|P|i||:- 



wm 



mmm]' 



y \n i 




ass. 



Hook \NG7j 



I'l^KSKNTKl) IIY 



Rays of Dawn 



Rays of Dawn 



By the 

Right Rev. 
Arthur F. Winnington Ingram, D.D. 

Lord Bishop of London 



THE MOREHOUSE PUBLISHING CO. 

MILWAUKEE, WIS. 

1918 



Printed in Great Britain 



Gift from 

Robert i^ Owen 

Nov. 4, IdSl 






Dedication 



to the two archbishops who appointed 
me chief of the staff of the national 
mission; to my brother bishops both in 
england^ wales and scotland, who gave 
me so cordial a welcome into their 
dioceses; to the five secretaries who 
worked so harmoniously together; to 
the national mission council, to whose 
loyalty and initiative the church owes 
so much, i dedicate this book with 
affectionate gratitude 



PREFACE 

It has brought back many happy memories 
to read over again and correct for the press 
these sermons and addresses dehvered in such 
various places, and especially is this true of 
those delivered in the course of the National 
Mission. 

Why these particular ones survive out of the 
many hundreds which were delivered, is often 
a question of what the world calls chance. The 
first long one was taken down in shorthand, 
and it was delivered extempore to the Diocesan 
Conference of the London Dioceses, but it is 
a faithful summary of the message delivered 
from one end of England to the other, and as I 
read it over, I can see again the massed clergy 
of the Diocese of Ely in St. Mary's, Cambridge, 
the mixed gathering in Peterborough Cathe- 
dral, and the great congregation in the beau- 
tiful church at Grantham. I call up again 
before my mind Leeds Parish Church, where 
evening service was followed by a united 
communion next morning, Durham Cathedral 
vii 



Preface 

crowded to the doors, Newcastle with all the 
clergy of the Diocese at a great service, the 
Chapter-house at Carhsle full of its clergy; 
Ludlow Parish Church, Hereford Cathedral, 
Liverpool Cathedral, Wolverhampton Parish 
Church, Rochester Cathedral, Edinburgh 
Cathedral, St. Alban's Abbey, and finally, 
Truro Cathedral, all full of the clergy and 
laity of the surrounding district ; while, in the 
Dioceses which preferred their gatherings to 
be in great halls, Sheffield, Huddersfield, Man- 
chester, Oxford, Reading, Stratford, Colchester, 
Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth, Portsea, 
and Plymouth, stand out in my mind with 
special distinctness. 

Of all the many outdoor addresses given in 
London in the great Parks, and in my walk 
through London, with stations at selected 
spots, I have only found space for one address, 
that given on Tower Hill (No. VH) ; and I am 
able to give that, owing to the mere chance 
that someone in the crowd was reporting for 
the Christian World Pulpit, to which I make 
acknowledgment for the report. It was given 
under a fire of interruptions, as, on arriving at 
Tower Hill, I found a demonstration in pro- 
gress against the Church for the non-enlistment 
viii 



Preface 

of the clergy of military age ; old experience, 
however, gained in East London of handling 
crowds, came in useful on that occasion, and 
the crowd gradually veered round in favour of 
the Church. The sermons and addresses given 
in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's survive 
because they were written out for delivery in 
those great buildings, but I must apologise 
for the curt and often terse form of the appeal 
in many of the other addresses, as they are 
just cries from mind to mind and soul to soul, 
in the course of my task of trying to win a 
great City to the Feet of God. 

I have called the book Rays of Dawn, as I 
believe in each chapter there will be found 
some thought to kindle hope and some en- 
couragement to those in the night of sorrow 
and desolation to look for the'"morning. 

That there is a morning coming, I have no 
doubt at all. " Heaviness may endure for a 
night, but Joy cometh in the morning," and 
the chapters in this book give the reasons for 
my faith. I think I can see Rays of Dawn 
appearing ; not only of the Dawn of Victory for 
those who fight for the freedom of the world, 
but also of the Dawn of a better day for all 
mankind. Wickedness has sometimes to be 

ix 



Preface 

seen in all its naked horror before it can be 
crushed, and it is only against the background 
of deep darkness that true Light is seen to be 
Light. It is in the hope that this book may 
help others to believe in the Light, " Follow 
the Star " through the darkness, and look for 
the morning that I send out Rays of Dawn. 

A. F. LONDON. 

Lent, 191 8. 



PAGE 



CONTENTS 

I.— NATIONAL MISSION ADDRESSES 

I. The Church's Call to the Nation . 3 

11. Purifying the Nation ... 37 

III. "What wilt Thou have me to do?" 51 

IV. Realities — 

I. the power of the cross . . 63 

II. the strength and depth of the 

bible . . . . • ^ 7° 

III. THE church .... 80 

V. Knowing the Lord .... 90 

VI. The Conditions of Victory . .100 

VII. Is the War an Argument against 

God? . . . . . .110 

VIII. The Road to Damascus . . .122 

IX. Outspoken Witness . . . - 133 

II.— THE HOPE FOR THE FUTURE 

I. The Brotherhood of Capital and 

Labour ...... 145 

xi 



Contents 



PAGE 



II. Love Life's Chance . . . .152 

III. Christ the Invisible King . . 162 

III.— THE BRIGHTNESS OF DAWN 

I. The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 177 

II. Easter the Victory of Freedom . 189 

III. Following the Star . . . 204 



Xll 



I 

NATIONAL MISSION ADDRESSES 



RAYS OF DAWN 



THE CHURCH'S CALL TO THE NATION 

Why is it that there should be a special call 
addressed by the Church to the nation at this 
time, and what is that special message and 
call to be ? Now I honestly do not think 
that it ought to be necessary to convince 
any man who gives the subject any thought 
at all that it was to be expected that the 
Church should have some message to give to 
the nation at this time. It seems to me 
that the picture that you might obtain from 
certain papers, even Church papers, would be 
this : that the Church was an old gentleman 
in a long coat, with his hands in his pockets 
sitting over the fire, and that it takes two 
years to get his hands out of his pockets and 
another two years for him to get his coat off. 
I repudiate entirely that idea. The Church 

3 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

was meant to be an alert, mobile force, ready 
for action anywhere and everywhere, and only 
waiting for the pointing of the hand of God 
as to what it should do and whither it should 
go. That is our idea of the Church at this 
time of crisis in our country's history, when 
the nation has its back to the wall and is 
facing a far greater crisis than it has had 
to face for a thousand years. The idea that 
the Church should at such a time stand by 
and say nothing, I repudiate with all the 
indignation that I can command. The Church 
is the soul of the nation ; it has given the 
nation the idea of its Parliament, and been 
behind it at every critical moment in its 
history. What that Church must say requires 
a great deal of consideration, but my belief is 
this, that its first duty is to breathe into the 
nation just that courage and fortitude which 
at this moment it needs. 

Our Cause 

Think for a moment what it is our nation 

is really fighting for to-day. Nothing could 

have been plainer than the statement made 

by Sir Edward Grey* in the Press, which must 

* Now Viscount Grey of Fallodoa. 

4 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

have convinced everybody who may not have 
been already convinced. Sir Edward Grey 
said : " We were not responsible for this 
struggle. We did our best to avert it, only 
stopping short at the point of national dis- 
honour. But one nation was determined to 
have war, and has got it." They were deter- 
mined on it, and we as a matter of fact in the 
Providence of God seem marked out to pre- 
serve the most precious things that can be 
preserved in life. 

And, first of all, we are fighting to preserve 
the freedom of our own country. I can 
imagine nothing more calamitous than that 
the home of freedom should become a German 
province. As I said, going up and down th6 
lines in 191 5, I would rather die than see this 
country a German province. We do not 
cease to be citizens when we become clergy, 
and I feel, at the bottom of my soul, that 
every man of you would rather die than see 
such a calamity befall the world. 

But we are not only fighting for our own 
freedom, but for the freedom of the world, 
for the right to live for all those little nations 
that look to us — and at one time seemed to 
look in vain — to save them. I ventured to 

5 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

say to the venerable Archbishop of Serbia, 
when I led him by the hand in St. Paul's, 
that we should never cease fighting till his 
nation was restored and he was back on his 
archiepiscopal throne. Yes, we are really fight- 
ing, and it is a surprise to me that America * 
does not see it, for the freedom of the whole 
world. We are fighting for international 
honour as the secret and condition of the 
future brotherhood of nations. I pray from 
the bottom of my heart for 

"... the promised time 
When war shall be no more." 

We are not those who glory in war ; but 
how can war ever be averted and international 
peace secured unless one nation can trust 
another nation's word ? It is for the sanctity 
of treaties that our men are fighting and 
dying to-day. 

What, then, must be the first message of the 
Church to the nation ? " On to the end " ; f 
listen not for one moment to proposals for a 
patched-up peace which will only mean that 

* She now does with a vengeance. 

f The Prime Minister has said this very day, January i8, 
1918 : " We must go on or go under." 

6 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

those children of ours now in the cradle will 
have to do it all over again in a few years' 
time. I believe that the right message was 
given by Sir Henry Newbolt at the beginning 
of the war : 



" Ye that with me have fought and failed and fought 
To the last desperate trench of battle's crest 
Not yet to sleep, not yet ; your work is nought ; 
On that last trench the fate of all may rest ; 
Draw nigh, my friends ; and let your thoughts be high ; 
Great hearts are glad when it is time to give. 
Life is not life to him that dares not die 
And death not death to him that dares to live." 



I believe we have got to breathe that spirit 
into the nation. I greatly value a word that 
was sent to me by a friend ; I love to use it 
every time I can ; I have it in big letters over 
the door at Fulham. It is " Fortitude." 
" Fortitude to the end," whenever that end 
comes. And unless we are doing this through- 
out the whole country we are failing the nation 
at this great crisis of its history. 

Rolls of Honour 

Therefore I cannot help first of all asking 
some very plain questions. Are we actually 

7 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

backing up our boys and our men, and the 
women they leave behind them, to the very- 
limit of our power ? Do you clergy write to 
every one that leaves your parish, do you 
write to the chaplain of the regiment about 
every Churchman you know who goes from 
your parish ? Do you sit up late at night 
writing to those in the trenches ? I should 
have it upon my conscience if I did not answer 
every letter I get from the trenches by return 
of post — I get a good many. Do you make 
the women who are left behind feel that they 
have got a friend ? I am talking not only to 
the clergy, because you will find out before 
I have finished that in my view laymen have 
to take a most important part in this Day of 
God. Do you make the women left at home 
feel that they have brothers and fathers and 
friends here to look after them ? It is said 
that some of these women drink very much. 
Are we going to the utmost of our power to 
stand by them in their anxiety and loneliness ? 
A touching example of one of the things that 
might be done has been given me by the 
Rector of South Hackney. He has set up a 
Roll of Honour in every street. I know that 
every church has a Roll of Honour ; the 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

names of all those who have gone from the 
parish, and are now fighting or have fallen, 
are often read out every Sunday. But in 
South Hackney the roll has been set up in 
each street in the parish, and underneath the 
names is a prayer for those at the front. The 
people in the street are asked to learn the 
prayer and say it daily. At each side of the 
framed Roll of Honour vases are placed which 
the people keep filled with flowers. Although 
it is difficult to keep flowers in the gardens in 
the district, those placed in the vases are 
never touched. The clergy and people visit 
the places where the lists are up, and a short 
service is held, addresses are given to the 
people on the subject of national honour, and 
large crowds gather who are invited to a 
special service in the church. In one poor 
street the people willingly subscribed i5j". con- 
tributed in a house-to-house collection to 
provide the flowers. The only objection in 
connection with this effort has been made by 
one landlord who did not like nails being 
driven into the walls of a house. The people 
in the street told him, " You had better inter- 
view the vicar, but he is 6 ft. 2 in. and you 
are only 5 ft." Out of one slum street of 70 

9 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

houses in this district l8o men have gone to 
the front.* 

As we have gone from diocese to diocese f we 
have tried to take up all ideas that have come 
to us from any parish or any Deanery, and 
pass it on. I know there are Rolls of Honour 
in the churches. Do not be content with 
having them in church ; you might have 
them in the streets as well. In such ways the 
Church must show the people that it is sup- 
porting the men at the front, that it is stand- 
ing by them to the last. When they die we 
die ; when they win we win. 

Intercession 

Again, what about the Intercession services ? 
I have been told, and have received the inti- 
mation with some dismay, that the Inter- 
cession services have been dwindling away 
as the war lengthens out. It may be true 
or not ; it may be true in some places and 
not in others. To all here, both clergy and 

* Since this was written the Queen has visited this dis- 
trict, seen the Rolls of Honour, and expressed her cordial 
approval, and the example has been followed in nearly 
every parish in London. 

t This was a mission tour round thirty dioceses as Chief 
of the Staff of the National Mission. 

10 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

laity, I say, If it is so, what does it mean ? 
It means that we are forgetting one of the 
most important duties entrusted to us by 
God : that of being His viceroys. I believe 
that some of us scarcely realise the extra- 
ordinary power of prayer with which God 
has clothed man. " What is man, that Thou 
art mindful of him ; and the son of man, 
that Thou visitest him ? Thou hast made 
him a little lower than the angels to crown 
him with glory and honour." What is the 
glory and honour with which man is crowned ? 
It is the extraordinary power of being the 
viceroy of God. As an old writer on prayer, 
Andrew Murray, says in his School of Prayer, 
" We are viceroys of God. God rules the 
world through our prayers." That is to say, 
He is looking to us to co-operate with Him, 
to be fellow workers with Him, and when 
St. Paul said, " God forbid I should sin 
against God in ceasing to pray for you," he 
was putting a far greater value on the power 
of Intercession than we have been accustomed 
to put upon it ourselves. 

I want to ask this great body of clergy and 
laity whether they cannot go back to their 
parishes with a new conception of what a 

II 



The Church's Call, to the Nation 

viceroy of God is. If we diminish our prayers 
we lessen God's power of acting through us. 
It is in answer to these prayers that He acts. 
If we are failing God, we are failing our sons, 
we are failing our fighting men. We must go 
back to intercession, so that instead of a less 
there shall be a greater tide of intercession 
than ever rising up to God. Some of you may 
remember in a rather famous publication a 
picture of a nun at her prayers. There she 
is kneeling, a nun, looking such a frail obstacle 
to oppose to the sin of the world ; but the 
eye of faith sees that from that slight figure 
there is radiating through invisible wires power 
to every part of the world. If that is true of 
one single figure, what about the prayers of a 
united Church ? They would simply radiate 
power throughout the whole world, power we 
cannot see, but which we are promised shall 
come down in answer to prayer. We are 
positively sinning against God when we cease 
to pray. I hope that there will be a great 
revival of intercession in the diocese with 
priests and people intent on radiating power 
through prayer with far greater determination 
and spirit ; and we have to get the same spirit 
into the nation. 

12 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

Moral Indignation 

Again, I believe myself that burning indig- 
nation against proved wrong is part of our 
Christianity. I do not believe that Chris- ^j 
tianity rightly understood condemns righteous j 
indignation. St. Paul says : " Who is weak " 
and I am not weak ? who is offended and I 
burn not ? " He knew something about right- 
eous indignation. It is the Christ in us that 
makes us burn with indignation when we hear 
of children ill-treated and women wronged in 
a most terrible way. This burning indignation 
is a part of Christ within us, Christ Himself 
as when He cleared the Temple courts. On 
the other hand, we must never mix up the 
innocent with the guilty. I am thankful to 
think that in East London righteous indigna- 
tion at the sinking of the Lusitania was shown ; 
but when it took the form of wrecking inno- 
cent people's houses the Church protested, 
and even sheltered some of those who were 
in danger. Never allow the innocent to be 
mixed up with the guilty. I believe that our 
Lord's prayer, " Father, forgive them, for 
they know not what they do," covered the 
soldiers who, acting under orders, were crucify- 

13 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

ing the Son of God. They did not know what 
they did. We must let that prayer cover in 
our minds those in the Zeppelins and sub- 
marines who are acting under orders, and 
would be shot if they did not obey. I do 
not want the Church not to be full of indig- 
nation against wrong ; I want it to be ; but 
we must have the true Christian spirit, and 
not mix up the innocent with the guilty. 

A Bright View of Death 

Then, again, it is the duty of the Church 
in the war to keep very bright the hope of 
the other life. 

" Lest Heaven be for the greybeards hoary ; 

God, Who made boys for His delight, 
Goes in earth's hour of grief and glory 

And calls the boys in from the night ; 
When they come trooping from the war 
Our skies have many a new gold star. 

" Heaven's thronged with gay and careless faces 
New-waked from dreams of dreadful things. 
They walk by green and pleasant places, 

And by the crystal water springs 
Forget the nightmare field of slain 
And the fierce thirst and the strong pain. 

" Forget ! God smiles to see them merry, 
For His own Son was once a boy ; 
They never shall be old and weary, 

But of their youth shall have great joy, 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

And in the playing fields of Heaven 

Shall run and leap, new-washed, new-shriven. 

" Now Heaven's by golden boys invaded, 
'Scaped from the winter and the storm. 

Stainless and simple as He made it, 

God keeps the boy's heart out of harm. 

The old wise Saints look down and smile. 

They are so young and without guile. 

" Oh, if the sonless mothers weeping, 
The widowed girls, could look inside 
The country that hath them in keeping 
Who went to the great war and died. 
They would rise and put their mourning off. 
Praise God, and say ; ' He has enough.' " * 

Now words like these, beautiful as I think 
them, give what I call a bright view of 
death. We have not risen to the spirit of our 
responsibilities, of our glorious privileges, if we 
have not in some way, however simple, brought 
home this bright view of death to the nation 
in the war, if we have not shown that death 
is not the ultimate calamity and the end of 
all. The career of some brilliant boy, with a 
great future before him, is not finished when 

* Reproduced from Flower of Touth : Poems in War Time, 
y. 6d. net, by the kind permission of the author, Katharine 
Tynan, and of the publishers, Messrs. Sidgwick & Jackson, 
London. The poem can be obtained separately, price 2d. ; 
profits to Dublin Red Cross Hospital. 

IS 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

he is taken away in what we call the very 
middle of his career. Do let us believe, and 
make people believe, that his career is not 
finished but only beginning. " He asked life 
of Thee, and Thou gavest him a long life, 
even for ever and ever " — to believe this is to 
abolish Death. 

But then we pass to the second duty of the 
Church. 



Where Repentance comes in 

Not only is this nation of ours in the war, 
but also it is under the war. We cannot, 
indeed, merely call the war a punishment for 
our sins, for if we had been more sinful, 
adding covv^ardice to our other faults, we might 
have avoided it altogether. It does, indeed, 
come straight out of the sin of Europe as '> 
whole ; but in this matter the special guilt 
attaches to Germany, and not to us or our 
Allies. Our cause is just. Some people 
imagine that to say this is inconsistent with 
calling the nation to repentance. But there 
is no reason for so thinking. When you are 
called to a great honour do you or do you 
not become more aware of your own infirmity ? 

i6 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

I have been called to be Chief of the Staff of 
the Great National Mission from one end of 
England to another, and I am therefore all 
the more acutely conscious of my own in- 
firmities, sins, and shortcomings. That being 
the case, as Canon Scott Holland pointed out 
in the Commonzvealth, if we believe in the 
righteousness of our cause, if we believe we 
are called to safeguard the wonderful gifts 
Christianity has brought to the world, we are 
called to repent. To put it in my own words 
— I do not want to put words into Dr. Holland's 
mouth which he would not use — I think of 
that splendid metaphor of the Old Testament, 
the " polished shaft." That is what a Chris- 
tian should become, a " polished shaft," a 
shaft placed in the quiver of the bow of God 
for use in the day of His wrath. The more 
we believe that, the more certain we have to 
be that the shaft does not break in His hand. 
There is always a possibility that the shaft of 
His own choosing, the bolt for His quiver, 
may break in His hand in the day of trial. 

It is because I believe so intensely in the 

righteousness of our cause that with all the 

more force of conviction I go up and down 

England preaching the mission of repentance 

c 17 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

to the nation. It was left to a great admiral 
and a great general to say the two things that 
wanted saying to-day. One of our admirals 
said, " When England looks out with humbler 
eyes and prayer on her lips, then she can begin 
to count the days towards the end " ; and it 
was Sir William Robertson who said, " I fear 
that even yet too many of us are putting an 
undue amount of trust in ' Chariots and 
Horses.' We may confidently rely upon our 
Sailors and Soldiers fighting bravely, and count 
upon having abundant ammunition, but we 
must not stop at that. A serious determination 
on the part of the nation to seek and deserve 
Divine help would, we may hope, enable us 
to take a true perspective of the war, and it 
would undoubtedly furnish valuable help to 
our gallant Sailors and Soldiers at the front." 
Therefore we have to face the question. What 
is the duty of the Church to a Nation under 
the war ? And, although I begin in order of 
thought with the nation, you will find that in 
order of action we begin with the Church. 
Let us quite frankly face some of the sins of 
the nation which might make it break in the 
hands of God. 



i8 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

National Sins 

(i) First of all we said, and we still say it, 
that just before the war we were on the brink 
of three tremendous evils. We were on the 
brink of civil war. No one could see how 
it was to be avoided. We were on the brink 
of a bitterness betw^een men and women such 
as few of us had ever seen before. We were 
on the brink of an industrial strife which would 
have been the greatest ever known in our 
history. It is absurd to say it was no one's 
fault ; some broken fellowship or brotherhood 
must have brought us within measurable 
distance of three such perils. We are posi- 
tively mad if we as a nation waste this lull 
in our domestic quarrels not to find out what it 
was that was wrong, and eradicate the cause. 

(2) Secondly, was it not also true when the 
Worcestershire clergy, who went into retreat, 
sent us out that warning note from the Wor- 
cestershire Beacon ? From the Worcestershire 
Beacon in the time of the Armada was sent out 
a flare which went through England. From 
the Worcestershire Beacon has gone out a 
warning that the nation was forgetting the 
majesty of God. Ask yourselves whether it 

19 



The "Church's Call to the Nation 

was not so. Was Sunday being better kept, 
or worship being better attended, or family- 
prayer observed ? On these points we are 
convicted of sin. 

(3) What about the national drink bill ? 
I know I am a teetotaller, a tainted person, 
as I suppose every teetotaller is. Therefore 
I will speak to the most unconverted non- 
teetotaller among you, if there is one ; I will 
put it upon the ground of national economy. 
We were told we were all called upon to save 
every penny. We are all in our little way 
doing our best to economise, and, while we 
are doing this, it is from the point of view of 
national economy a disgrace and a danger that 
the national drink bill should go up by leaps 
and bounds. It rose in the first year of the 
war from 160 to 170 millions, and it rose 
in the second year from 170 to 181 millions, 
while we have before us the example of our 
two Allies, Russia and France. Russia, with 
its splendid sacrifice, lost ninety millions of 
revenue by a stroke of the pen. Already that is 
largely recouped by the savings of the people.* 

* This was written before the debacle in Russia, and the 
limits placed by the Government of Great Britain on the 
amount of beer brewed. 

20 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

In France not only has the sale of absinthe 
been prohibited, but the landed proprietors, 
who have a right to make and sell intoxicating 
liquor, have surrendered that privilege. On 
the other side, the drink in our country be- 
came at one time a national danger. We are 
simply fooling away this great Day of God 
unless we face our drunken habits. No doubt 
the Liquor Control Board has done great good 
in reducing the hours of the sale of drink, and 
thus showing that drunkenness can be reduced 
by regulation and legislation. That is what 
we temperance people have said for years. 
The Government is waking up to the fact that 
this drink evil is a national danger with which 
they have got to deal. We shall be mad if 
after the war we allow the old hours of sale 
to come back. Unless we repent of this 
national sin of drink, we are not following the 
call of repentance, and therefore not of hope. 
(4) Take even a more difhcult point to put 
before you, the ravage in this nation of lust. 
Some of you may have been wakened up by 
the Report on contagious diseases, and it will 
have surprised many decent people to find that 
ten per cent, of the population are affected. 
Apart from that we are not going to stand by 

21 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

while this goes on. We are nothing if not a 
fighting Church. The Church is no mere 
debating society, but really a fighting force. 
If people in London think we are going to 
tolerate an open moral sewer in London, they 
are making a great mistake. If music halls 
are still to be known as places of assignation, 
if we are going to allow things to be put before 
young people in cinema shows to injure their 
minds, then they have yet to learn what the 
power of the Church is. The Church in the 
old days fought to the death through unpopu- 
larity and persecution for real principles. I 
am afraid sometimes we are getting too much 
at peace with the world. You may soon be 
called upon to act. I am trying negotiation 
first. If that fails I shall call upon the whole 
Christian community of London, to see whether 
we Christians are going to be masters in our 
own house or not.* 

(5) Well, then I will take another national 
sin : yes, I must call it national sin. Why do 
you suppose we were given this tremendous 
empire of ours ? It is being blind to the 
history of empires to imagine that it was given 

* Since this was said, a considerable improvement has 
been attained in all these directions. 

22 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

to us for ourselves. The Jews imagined this, 
and they went down ; and the Roman Empire 
went down for the same reason. We have to 
ask ourselves why we were given this tremen- 
dous empire throughout the world. There is 
only one answer : we were given this empire 
throughout the world, we were given this 
tremendous power, that we might be able 
to spread the Gospel throughout the world. 
Let us face the truth about this. Have we 
done it ? By tremendous efforts, by ceaseless 
speeches and sermons, we have managed to 
accumulate one million a year to spend upon 
foreign missions. What is the result ? Five 
millions a day on war ! That is all. You 
have only to put the two things side by side : 
one million a year to spread the Gospel, five 
millions a day on war ! There is only one 
thing that can ever stop war in this world, 
and that is the spread of the knowledge of the 
Lord, " They shall not hurt or destroy in all 
My holy mountain, saith the Lord." When 
and why ? When " the earth shall be filled 
with the knowledge of God as the waters 
cover the sea." Therefore, if we are given 
back our empire which has been threatened, 
do let us realise that we must follow this call 

23 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

in the future. There must be a new mis- 
sionsLvy spirit. We must realise that our empire 
is a trust, and we must discharge that trust 
with perfect fairness towards all other religions. 
We must deal with Mohammedans and Hindus 
in India with absolute consideration for their 
faith. But we want a new missionary spirit 
breathed throughout the nation, so that it may- 
realise the need of discharging effectually one 
of its greatest duties. 

The Church to repent first 

These are five things at least of which the 
nation must repent. But who is to bring the 
nation to repentance ? A self-complacent 
Church ? The nation will never take any 
message of repentance from an unrepentant 
Church. The vicar of one of our churches 
was spoken to by a churchwarden after the 
morning sermon, which had been on the 
National Mission. " I am all for the National 
Mission now," the churchwarden said. The 
vicar said, " I did not think you were very 
keen about it." The other replied, " I thought 
you were going to stand in your pulpit and 
say, ' Repent, repent, repent.' But, now I 

24 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

understand you are going to be the first to 
repent, I am all for the National Mission." 
He did not mean to score off his vicar. What 
he meant was this, that as a member of the 
nation he was not going to sit down and have 
an unrepentant Church asking the nation to 
repent. They know too much about us. 
They are not going to take such a message 
from us ; but will only take it from a Church 
that will lead in repentance. Therefore, before 
we preach the message of repentance to the 
nation, we dare not but look into our own 
hearts, and set our own house in order, and see 
what the Church has to repent of. 

(i) First of all it has to repent of one signal 
failure which has been shown up during the 
war. It has not failed altogether. Its sons 
in glorious numbers have gone out to do their 
duty. Look at the choirs and the Men's 
Society, the Church Lads' Brigade, the Scouts ; 
their elder members have all gone. But where 
we have failed is this : we have failed in bring- 
ing home to the manhood of the nation as 
gathered in our great battleships and camps 
the sacramental religion outlined in the Prayer 
Book. We are bound to face this. Why are 
there only twenty on a great battleship who 

25 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

are regular communicants, even under a most 
popular and well-beloved chaplain ? Again, 
in a camp of five thousand men there are often 
not more than about twenty regular weekly 
communicants. And yet seventy per cent, of 
the men in the Army and Navy are returned 
as members of our Church. It is a disgrace 
to the Church that this state of things should 
exist. I am not going to blame anyone out 
there. The fault lies in the want of training 
in the parishes. It is quite true that many 
more young men are pouring in now to be con- 
firmed. I confirmed two hundred in the short 
fortnight I was at the front in 1915. In the 
camps now they are coming out to be confirmed 
in a very encouraging way. We have to find 
out the way to train our people in the religion 
of the Prayer Book. I was rather struck the 
other day by a story from Egypt of a chaplain 
who was in despair over his brigade. He could 
only get a handful of men to go to Holy Com- 
munion until they came to Egypt. Then 
hundreds came forward to be prepared for 
Confirmation. The reason was this. They 
had seen the Holy Communion service for the 
first time in the desert, and when they saw 
people like themselves going up to receive the 

26 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

Communion they asked : " Why should not 
I receive it ? " " You are not confirmed," 
was the reply. " May I be prepared ? " " Oh, 
yes." So hundreds came to Holy Communion 
because they had seen a Communion service 
for a neighbouring regiment in the desert. 
Well, now, that is the first thing which we 
must face. 

(2) The second thing we have to repent of 
is that we are entirely out of touch with the 
world of labour. God forbid we should ever 
become Court Chaplains to King Demos and 
flatter the working man. At the same time, 
it is a very striking thing, and a cause for 
searching of hearts, that the Church of the 
Carpenter is largely disregarded by the car- 
penters of to-day. Can it be because we come 
so much from the more leisured class and look 
to the rich for subscriptions ? Whatever the 
reason, it is certainly worthy of notice that 
we have very little influence on the world of 
labour to-day. 

(3) And, thirdly, are we ourselves a brother- 
hood ? Are we a loving, harmonious brother- 
hood for the world to see ? A bishop of one 
of the African dioceses says he dreads the day 
when the post brings the Church papers from 

27 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

home, with their bitterness and party spirit, 
which upset the minds of the missionary- 
priests. Therefore, we have to ask ourselves, 
if we are going to preach the Gospel of brother- 
hood to the nation : Are we a brotherhood 
ourselves ? Unless we repent of the lack of 
brotherliness which is so often shown in the 
Church, we shall preach no effective Gospel 
of Union and brotherhood. We must first be 
united and brotherly ourselves. 

I almost hesitate to bring in my next two 
points, but I must. I put them before every 
diocese I visited, and, therefore, I must put 
them before my own. 

(4) The sin of sloth ! Can it be said that 
in some parishes in the London diocese nothing 
is being done ? If so the whole diocese ought 
to be ashamed of it. We have got to ask our- 
selves at this Mission whether there are any 
parishes in which little or nothing is being 
done. If so, the laity are to blame as much 
as the clergy. They ought not to allow the 
clergy to do nothing, while they ought not, on 
the other hand, to leave them to do all the 
work themselves. Are we guilty ? We are 
the only people who are left to ourselves, and 
are on our honour about our work. The fore- 

28 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

man will ask questions if any man comes late 
to a City warehouse, while we, as a Church, 
are left to our honour as to loyalty in our work. 
" Work while it is day, for the night cometh 
when no man can work." Are we carrying 
out that command ? 

(5) Then, again, it is a most unforgivable sin 
of the Church to be dull. It is positively mis- 
chievous. The Church is daily to be inspired 
by the life of the Spirit, and the gift of the 
Spirit is warmth and love. A young man came 
home from the front the other day and wrote to 
someone : " The old parish church is as dull as 
ever. I cannot stand it now. I am off to the 
Y.M.C.A." God bless all good work that is 
being done by that and other organisations 
among our soldiers. But if we are going to 
sit down under the Church of the living 
God being less attractive than any Y.M.C.A. 
in the world, we have not done our duty. 
We have to ask ourselves if we are not holding 
the people. Why is it ? Are we dull ? Have 
we lost interest in our own Gospel ? Are our 
services unattractive ? This Mission has got 
to go very deep. We have got to scrap every- 
thing that is in the way of the spreading of the 
Gospel of Jesus Christ. 

29 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

Who is to begin ? 
Now who has got to begin the repentance of 
the Church ? Undoubtedly the bishops. If 
the laity are not going to take a message of 
repentance from an unrepentant clergy, the 
clergy will not follow the lead of unrepentant 
bishops. A clergyman said long ago when I 
became a bishop, " I want my bishop to come 
to me straight from Jesus Christ." I was 
always grateful to him for saying that. We 
were speaking about bishops' incomes and 
houses ; but, whatever the argument was, he 
said a thing which has helped me enormously 
all these fifteen years. " I want my bishop 
to come to me straight from Jesus Christ." 
If there is anything in our position, houses, 
incomes, in our motors, in anything we have, 
which is preventing us from coming straight 
from Jesus Christ, that thing has got to be 
scrapped in this Day of God. And mind you 
we are going to do it. We are going to begin 
with a devotional meeting at Lambeth. If 
it is shown to us by the Spirit of God that 
we must alter the whole system, I can promise 
we are ready to do it.* 

* The Committee of the National Mission which deals 
with Redistribution of the Finances of the Church has not 
yet presented its report. 

30 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

Next the clergy must place their heads 
in dust and ashes. Once at a very solemn 
time in some cathedral, perhaps St. Paul's, 
kneeling at a great service, every clergyman 
here heard these words said : " Receive the 
Holy Ghost for the office and work of a 
Priest in the Church of God. . . . Whose sins 
thou dost forgive, they are forgiven, and whose 
sins thou dost retain, they are retained." 

Now you clergy are bound to ask : How far 
have I fulfilled that commission ? There was 
a young woman who saw an ordination for 
the first time, and she said to someone : " Do 
you mean to say that every clergyman I have 
ever met has been through that ? " We 
should always be showing that we have been 
through it. 

What Lay Priesthood involves 

Now I come to the laity. Do you realise 
that every one of you is also meant to be a 
priest ? I believe the doctrine of the priest- 
hood of the Church is very little understood. 
If it was rightly understood, there would be 
scarcely any Nonconformists, and a great deal 
of our own divisions would be bridged over. 
There is only one High Priest in Heaven and 

31 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

earth — Jesus Christ Himself. But the whole 
Church is the Body of Christ, the Body of 
that Priest. We who are ordained priests 
(so-called) are the organs of the priestly Body. 
All this is beautifully described in Dr. Moberly's 
Ministerial Priesthood. That is the Catholic 
doctrine of the priesthood. What is involved ? 
Why, that all of you laity — I am speaking now 
of men and women — all of you are priests. 
Though you did not have those solemn words 
that were said to ordained priests said to you, 
you, too, came to your confirmation and this 
was the description of the first Confirmation. 
" Then laid they their hands on them, and the 
Holy Ghost fell upon them. For as yet He 
had fallen upon none of them." The Holy 
Ghost did fall on you. At that moment 
you were ordained priests ; therefore, all these 
years since your confirmation, to say nothing of 
baptism, you have been expected not merely 
to criticise the clergy or take a general interest 
in Church work or merely to give subscriptions 
to some parish fund, but you have been 
expected to do five things. You are bound to 
ask yourselves whether you have been doing 
them or not. It is to do your special work 
every day and not to carry over one day's work 

32 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

to the next ; to offer up daily your sacrifice of 
prayer and praise ; every day by intercession 
to run in between the living and the dead ; 
to keep every day a holy day ; to serve as a 
witness. Europe was converted by witnesses 
unknown to all but God ; witnesses 

"... that rest 
In God's still memory folded deep." 

Each layman every day must ask himself, 
" How many have I brought to Christ ? I 
am to be a priest too ; I cannot get out of it. 
I shall be judged as a priest. Have I in any 
way failed to discharge in full the priesthood 
of the laity ? " I believe, and I say it with 
all affection, that many of you when, perhaps 
in the quiet hours at St. Paul's and other 
places, you face that question, will say, " God 
be merciful to me a sinner." 

Signs of Hope 

But this is not to be only a Mission of 
Repentance, but also a Mission of Hope, and to 
my mind if only we can get enough penitence 
we shall have plenty of hope. 

I find the greatest sign of hope is in the 
growing penitence and humility in the Church. 
But, then, secondly, look at the splendid out- 
D 33 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

burst of service we have seen. We often hear 
great truths from children, and I heard one 
from a little boy whom I visited. His mother 
had turned her beautiful home into a hospital. 
There were fifty wounded soldiers in it. The 
little boy, instead of complaining of having 
his home turned upside down, said, " Mother, 
we cannot go back to our old life after the war, 
can we ? " I believe myself that is the feeling 
not only of boys but of those girls of ours who 
spend long hours and hours in hospitals nursing 
the sick, or looking after canteens or doing other 
bits of war work. They are not going back to 
the old life they led before the war, idle and 
purposeless. They have tasted another kind 
of life and they will not lose the taste of it. 
We surely are not going back to our old life 
after the war. 

Then, again, what a wonderful thing it is 
that everybody is becoming more and more 
conscious that every man is born to be a 
Christian. This is coming out in numberless 
ways. I get many letters from the front illus- 
trating this. I found one day a young fellow 
waiting for me at 9.30 p.m. at Fulham. He 
wanted to be confirmed the day before he 
went back to the front. I took him in for the 

34 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

night and confirmed him at an early morning 
service. That shows the earnestness of some 
of these young men. Another said, " We did 
not allow much bad language on the Peninsula, 
I can tell you ; it was very different from 
Egypt." This change is going on among our 
boys ; it is becoming plainer every day. 

Mr. Horace Hutchinson, in writing his little 
book From Douht to Faith, is an instance of the 
way in which laymen are witnessing. The old 
shyness and reserve has to be broken down, 
and every man who is really converted has 
to be a witness to the Christ in whom he truly 
believes. But, further, every man was born 
to be a Churchman. Bible-reading and 
prayers at home do not lead to the development 
of the highest Christian character. It is a 
grand foundation, a grand start. But man 
was born for a society ; born to lose himself 
in order to find himself. Our boys, our soldiers 
at the front, are losing themselves to find them- 
selves in the great cause of our country. It 
is becoming plainer and plainer that man is 
not only born to be a Christian, he is born to 
be a Churchman ; born to lose himself to find 
himself in a great Church. . 

It is then with tremendous hope that we 

35 



The Church's Call to the Nation 

launch this great effort. We want to put a 
vision before ourselves. " Where there is no 
vision the people perish " ; where there is a 
vision the people revive. This is the vision : 
" They shall teach no more every man his 
neighbour, and every man his brother, saying : 
Know the Lord : for they shall all know Me, 
from the least of them unto the greatest of 
them." 

There is no reason why this should not be 
true : " They shall know Me," God says, 
" from the least to the greatest." 

Take hold of this vision ; be not disobedient 
to it. Be content with nothing less than a 
new nation, a new Church, and at last a new 
world. 



36 



II 

PURIFYING THE NATION* 

" He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver." — Mal. 
iii. 3. 

After two and a half years of war, we have 
arrived at the real test of our fortitude and 
courage; a wave of pessimism, please God, 
only a temporary one, is passing over the 
nation at home, though not, and this is to be 
noticed, over the soldiers in the field or the 
sailors at their respective bases. 

" The advent of Rumania into the war " 
(so the talk runs), which was once thought to 
be about to shorten it, bids fair now, so we 
are told, to lengthen it by supplying the enemy 
with much-needed supplies. The successful 
extension of long-distance submarines is en- 
dangering the food supply of the nation ; 
nowhere have we yet been very successful, and 
Kut and Gallipoli have lowered our prestige 
throughout the East. 

* An address delivered in Westminster Abbey on Advent 
Sunday, 1916. 

37 



Purifying the Nation 

And as always happens in all wars in all 
nations, a disappointed nation turns upon its 
leaders, and armchair Napoleons tell us day 
by day exactly what ought to be done. 

But more formidable than this growing dis- 
trust with the leadership of the nation, is a 
latent disbelief in God Himself. " He really 
ought to be doing something to help us at 
last ; , of course we were bound to pay for our 
foolish mistakes about the peaceful designs of 
Germany ; we see now of course, our mad 
folly in not listening years ago to the old soldier 
who was allowed to utter disregarded in the 
wilderness his only too well justified warnings, 
and was told by some that he ought to have 
his pension taken away for his pains ; but we 
have surely paid for this folly now ; we have 
raised five million men by voluntary enlist- 
ment, and have given the precious blood of 
our nearest and our dearest, surely if we are 
fighting for the freedom of the world and are 
standing by the weak against the strong, and 
for international honour, and for the principles 
of chivalry in war, and if there is a God Who 
loves these things. He ought to be doing some- 
thing soon. The enemy grows more ruthless, 
more merciless every hour ; thousands of 

38 



Purifying the Nation 

defenceless Belgians are carried into slavery ; 
innocent merchantmen and even trawlers are 
sunk every day, and yet God does nothing." 

But has it ever occurred to those who ask 
these questions so bitterly now, to ask them- 
selves quite frankly : " How much they them- 
selves trusted and served God in the days 
before the war ? " 

In a striking letter quoted by Mr. Burroughs 
in his book 7he Valley of Decision I find this 
extract ; the letter was written from the 
trenches : 

" The man who has come out here with a 
little faith, learns here to see the God he 
loves more clearly than ever before. 

" The man who has brought no faith 
with him spends his time cursing the war, 
swearing at everything, fretting and worry- 
ing. ... I cannot honestly say that men 
often find their Saviour for the first time 
in the trenches, although perhaps an old 
love for spiritual things, long forgotten, 
is stirred up within them. Certainly in 
the hour of death, I think their thoughts 
turn to the possibility of a future life. 

" But the man who comes out loving 

39 



Purifying the Nation 

God finds, when for the first time in his 
life he feels that any moment may be his 
last, that love spreads into a supreme 
trust." 

And again he says : 

" The huge trust which springs up in 
moments of peril will in a large number 
of cases leave men strong, keen and earnest 
Christians if and when God brings them 
back to the safety of their homes." 

Now, as is often the case, these letters from 
the front, give us much food for thought at 
home ; is any such " huge trust " in God 
rising at home ? if not, why not ? 

(i) Is it because we have not got even that 
minimum of faith and love, of which the 
writer so humbly and modestly speaks ? 

What right has a man who has never prayed 
to God before the war for years, or a woman 
who has made her own comfort and pleasure 
her god, to expect God, while they have not 
changed, to make them His special favourites 
and the choice instruments of His Will ? 

Nay ! How can we expect a nation, however 
righteous its cause, at once and without repent- 

40 



Purifying the Nation 

ance or amendment, to be fully used and 
blessed by God. 

There is a striking sentence and response 
which occurs in the service for the Consecra- 
tion of a Church, As the parish priest brings 
up the vessels for consecration, the Bishop is 
directed to say : 

" Be ye clean which bear the vessels of the 
Lord," 

and the priest answers : 

" I will wash my hands in innocency, O 
Lord, and so will I go to Thine altar." 

I believe myself fully that we have as a 
nation been called to " bear the vessels of the 
Lord " ; I have said a thousand times, and 
I say it again, that we as a nation never did 
a more Christlike thing than when we went 
to war in August 1914 ; I believe that we bear 
on high as a sacred trust the vessel of a world's 
freedom, purity and honour. 

But is it consistent with this to have ten 
per cent, of the nation afflicted with a disease 
which ultimately comes from immorality ? Is 
it consistent with this to have the streets of 
London so dangerous that the very boys who 

41 



Purifying the Nation 

have come across the seas to fight for us find 
here sometimes their ruin ? 

" I will wash my hands in innocency, O 
Lord, and so will I go to Thine altar." Have 
we even begun to say it yet ? The only help 
you get from the prophets of the people 
amounts to this : " You can't be too particular 
what the boys do of an evening, when they 
are fighting so bravely for us," whereas it is 
just because they are so gloriously gallant and 
brave that we want to save them from a worse 
fate than death. 

(2) " But these things all happen when men 
and women are drunk or have been drinking." 

Is it really supposed that God, Who has 
told us that " No drunkard shall inherit the 
Kingdom of God," is likely to accept this as 
an excuse from those who are called to " bear 
the vessels of the Lord " ? 

I have not forgotten my mid^iight march 
through Westminster a year or two before the 
war. In an hour I had collected from the 
public-houses in the immediate neighbourhood 
of the Abbey a number of men, mostly young 
and all half intoxicated. Thank God those 
late hours are stopped now, and must never 
be allowed to be reintroduced again. 

42 ^ 



Purifying the Nation 

But even since the war began, in August 
191 5, the Rev. F. B. Meyer wrote to the 
Times : 

" If only people who may resent this 
letter would spend a week-end in a-certain 
broad thoroughfare with which I am 
familiar, they would, like Dante, have a 
vision of hell — jars and bottles of liquor 
are passed from hand to hand in the open 
street. The pavements are covered with 
groups engaged in drinking, fighting and 
screaming till one or two in the morning. 
Sunday is thus inaugurated and con- 
cluded." 

But it is not only possibly bigoted Bishops 
or leading Nonconformist Ministers who speak 
like this. Mr. Alfred Booth, Chairman of the 
Cunard Line, addressing a Liverpool audience 
in December 1915, said : 

*' The most glaring example of a form of 
consumption which we could perfectly 
well dispense with is the drink traffic. I 
am not thinking now of the Temperance 
side of the question. Important as that 

43 



Purifying the Nation 

is, we have got far beyond that now. I 
am thinking of the demand which this 
trade makes upon the services of our 
ships, our railways and carts and of our 
labour. Thirty thousand tons a week of 
barley and other produce are brought into 
this country for the brewing and distilling 
trades. Think of the demand which this 
makes on the depleted resources of our 
mercantile marine. Then all this stuff, 
together with the larger quantity which 
is grown at home has to be carted and 
hauled by rail to the brewery or distillery, 
and then brought back again and dis- 
tributed to the consumer. In addition 
to this, 6000 miners are kept permanently 
employed getting coal, and 36,000 tons 
of coal have to be sent every week to 
these breweries and distilleries. Taken in 
the aggregate the services absorbed by 
this trade are on a gigantic scale, and 
(notice this) the net result of it all is a 
decrease in national efficiency. I say in 
all seriousness," says Mr. Booth, " that, 
if we are to be able to maintain our armies 
in the field, we shall before very long have 
to choose between bread and beer." 

44 



Purifying the Nation 

That is the opinion of a business man, and 
there is no good blaming the Government ; 
it has been said that every nation gets the 
Government it deserves, and it is perfectly 
clear that, until public opinion is altered, the 
Government dare not take stronger measures. 
At present, as it w^as in the days of Isaiah, 
" The people love to have it so, and what shall 
there be at the end thereof ? " 

(3) For can it be yet said that as a nation 
we have wholly come back to God ? 

It is quite clear that " if there is a God, He 
is everything " ; Mr. Burroughs, in the book to 
which I have referred, finely quotes Browning 
in this connection : 

" Religion's all or nothing ; it's no mere smile 
O' Contentment, sigh of aspiration, sir — 
No quality o' the finelier tempered clay- 
Like its whiteness or its brightness ; rather stuff 
O' the very stuff, life of life, and self of self." 

Either Paul is mad or Festus ; if Paul is not 
mad, then Festus is — Festus who left out God, 
or who patronised Him or argued about Him, 
to pass the time of day. 

And yet how many Festuses have we had ! 
How many may be among you who read these 
words ? '* Well ! I vote that there is a God," 

4S 



Purifying the Nation 

said a well-meaning man to encourage me after 
a lecture in the open air in an East End Park. 
And that dumb instinct for God has not been 
silenced by all the secularist arguments or the 
long reign of a materialistic gospel of comfort ; 
it is always there, and it is the hope of the 
future. 

But could God, if He had judged by out- 
ward signs have known in recent years that we 
voted there was a God ? Was His Day more 
or was it less observed ? Was He more or was 
He less openly worshipped ? Did He control 
the national life ? 

In a noble letter quoted in the Press, written 
by Blake and Deane to the Speaker, during 
Cromwell's first Dutch War, these words 
occur : " We dare not in this great business 
to promise anything for or to ourselves, because 
it is God alone Who giveth courage and con- 
duct with opportunity and success in the day 
of His salvation." 

Have we had the same open acknowledgment 
of God in our nation's life in recent years 
before the war ? It is for that reason that I 
would recall your minds to the great picture 
of God in the book of Malachi : " He sits as 
a refiner and purifier of silver." The trial 

46 



Purifying the Nation 

goes on ; the fire burns ; the heat is great, 
but it is not purposeless ; the silver is there 
all right and there is going to be a great use 
made of it, but it still needs to be purified 
and refined. 

We cannot remember too often the words 
of the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand 
Fleet, Sir David Beatty : " When the nation 
turns to God with humble heart, and prayer 
upon its lips, then we may begin to count the 
days towards the End ! " 

I hold this picture of God to be specially 
appropriate to-day. 

(i) Because it recognises the beauty, the 
value of what has been revealed in the war. 
Officers can find no language adequate to 
describe the patience, endurance and courage 
of our men ; I asked the heads of the great 
City firms, when we held a memorial service 
for the hundreds of City clerks who had given 
their lives, if they did not feel like men who 
find a " treasure hid in a field " ? They little 
realised the heroes they v/ere breeding in their 
offices. 

The silver has come out also in the service 
and loving sacrifice of our girls ; there is not 
an idle girl in England to-day, and as for the 

47 



Purifying the Nation 

fortitude of our mothers — I speak as one who 
lives among the mourners — it is too beautiful 
for words. 

Already the great Furnace of Affliction has 
purified the silver, and in the glowing metal, 
God already sees a reflection of Himself, the 
sacrifice of Calvary is being reproduced every 
day. 

(2) In the second place, this picture of God is 
so encouraging because it reveals God at work. 

He is not idle or forgetful, or uninterested ; 
" He is not on a journey," nor is He an absentee 
landlord of His world ; He is in the thick of it 
all as ever, but, as ever. He is obliged to work 
by the laws He has laid down for Himself 
in dealing with the children of men ; we are 
told that the Son of God Himself on earth 
" could do no mighty work because of their 
unbelief " — before He came into the world at 
all, He had to wait for the fulness of time, 
and the great Advent itself will only come 
when the times are ripe. 

But He hopes on, and works on ; little by 
little the dross is purged away ; the silver 
becomes clearer ; this is a Day of God which 
is to change the world for ever, and the process 
must not be hurried. 

48 



Purifying the Nation 

Church and nation must humble themselves 
before His cleansing Hands, and there is nothing 
that He cannot do with a humble Church and 
a GoD-fearing nation ; we may change the 
Government or not ; we may reconstruct the 
Cabinet, but no change will avail, unless as a 
nation we put God first ; and no difficulty 
can be so great out of which God cannot lead 
a humble and GoD-fearing nation. 

(3) But what is true of the nation is true of 
you and me. I have just come from a great 
gathering in one of our London theatres, and 
it was touching to hear two actors, a professor 
of art, and a great singer all bear their witness 
to the need of the human heart for God. 

He sits as a refiner and purifier of silver, 
and part of the silver treasure which He longs 
to purify and use for Himself is the human 
heart and love and powers of each living soul. 

Do you wonder that the trial is so hot, the 
loss so terrible, the anxiety so wearing that 
you have to bear ? Look up and see the 
object of it all ; He sits as a refiner and purifier 
of silver ; the fire is never allowed to be too 
hot ; there has no temptation taken you but 
such as is common to man and, if you look 
round, there is always the way of escape that 

E 49 



Purifying the Nation 

you may be able to bear it ; He doesn't send 
the war, but He uses the war ; He turns evil 
into good ; He breathes upon the flame lest it 
scorch you up. 

But more than that, He has sent His Son to 
be in the fire with you. 

There is a story in the Old Testament 
which will never die ; there were three mortal 
men cast into the fire, and the fire was heated 
sevenfold more than it was wont to be heated ; 
but they came out to the astonishment of the 
world, and even the smell of fire had not passed 
over them. 

What was the secret ? 

There had been a fourth with them in the 
burning flame, and the form of the fourth was 
as the Son of God. 



50 



Ill 

"WHAT WILT THOU HAVE ME TO DO?"* 

" And he, trembling and astonished, said, Lord, what 
wilt Thou have me to do ? " — Acts ix. 6. 

The conversion of St. Paul is one of those few 
events in human history which have really 
moved the world ; in the first place it is an 
absolutely certain event, so certain that — as 
is well known — it convinced of the truth of 
Christianity one of the leading deists of the 
eighteenth century ; there certainly was a 
man called Saul and he certainly became the 
character whom w£ know as St. Paul. But it 
is not only the certainty of the event which 
is so moving, but the touching character of 
it ; I never get tired of thinking of the great 
and dazzling light — " a light that never was 
on land or sea " — and the extraordinary 
romance of the voice which spoke and which 
rang in St. Paul's soul until the end of his 

* An address delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral, Nov. 19, 
1916. 

51 



* What wilt Thou have Me to do ? ' 

life, " Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me ? " 
" I am Jesus, Whom thou persecutest." 

But of course the special characteristic of 
the great event was its permanent and lasting 
character ; the man himself became a changed 
man ; his old ideas, his old prejudices, his old 
conventionalities were blown away as by the 
bursting of a shell ; his very first question shows 
the practical character of his conversion : 
" Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do ? " and 
to the letter and to the death this wonderful 
man lived out his own conversion ; he saw 
at the first instant that this stupendous experi- 
.ence must lead to action, nor did he once 
shrink from the difficult and dangerous action 
which he was instructed to take. 

Now we have just arrived in the National 
Mission at the critical moment. As chief of 
the staff of it, I have finished my tour round 
thirty dioceses of England at Plymouth and 
Truro ; nine times a week in open air and 
crowded hall or great church have I spoken 
in London since the beginning of the Mission ; 
hundreds have done the same ; three hundred 
priest messengers have been sent forth from 
St. Paul's Cathedral and their work has been 
supplemented by laymen and women ; the 

52 



' What wilt Thou have Me to do ? ' 

same is going on from one end of the country 
to the other ; very moving accounts come in 
from all over the country ; often in London 
the messenger arrives at the parish without his 
name being divulged, and gives his message for 
two or three or four days to a people which 
have been previously prepared by weeks of 
prayer and intercession. Men who have not 
previously been known as great preachers have 
thrown themselves on the Holy Ghost, and 
the Holy Ghost has honoured their trust. 
Some of the most remarkable impressions have 
been made by those who have been looked 
upon up to now as men of only average 
attainments and powers. 

But now comes the question — What is going 
to be the outcome of it all ? I have said it 
a thousand times and I say it again now : 
" If we are going back to the old England 
and the old Church of the time before the 
war, then not only will that Mission have been 
in vain, but our men and boys will have died 
in vain ; for the war to cease now and at once 
civil war in Ireland to break out ; the suffra- 
gette outrages to be resumed ; * and the great 

* One of these three is settled ; please God, the other 
two will not lag far behind. — ^January 1918. 

53 



'What wilt Thou have Mc to do?' 

industrial strife, only just averted by the war, 
to begin at last, if that is to happen, then the 
great day of opportunity w^ill have passed over 
our heads in vain. " If thou hadst knovi^n, 
even thou, at least in this thy day, the things 
which belong unto thy peace, but now they 
are hid from thine eyes " — ^would be uttered 
over our country, as it was uttered with tears 
over Jerusalem two thousand years ago. 
No ! we must recognise that : 

" Our world has passed away 
For wantonness o'erthrown, 
There's nothing left to-day 

But steel and fire and stone ! " * 

and it really does seem very like blasphemy 
against the Holy Ghost, to have all these 
hours of prayer, these fervent invocations of 
the Holy Spirit, and then to allow the National 
Mission to degenerate into a harmless way of 
spending the autumn for those who are not 
allowed to go to the front. 

The Nation, the Church and the Individual 
are bound, if they have seen the light and 
heard the voice with St. Paul to also ask with 
him : " Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do ? " 

(i) Let us take the nation first, 
* Rudyard KipUng. 

54 



' What wilt Thou have Me to do ? ' 

The nation acted up to its highest and most 
glorious traditions when it went to war in 
August 1914 ; and since then it has shown a 
grit and a power of initiative and a service and 
self-sacrifice which has astonished the world, 
and not the least the enemy which had dared 
to count upon the British as a decadent race. 

So far we are all agreed. 

But now what shallow critics fail to see is 
that it is the greatness of our vocation which 
induces Repentance ; it is only aspiration which 
makes anyone sorry that they are not better ; 
when we see the glorious role assigned to us 
by God in averting the degradation and 
slavery of the human race (what has happened 
in Belgium now is proof positive of this), and 
the trampling under foot of small nations and 
the " right to live " for Serbia, Belgium, 
Montenegro, Poland, Roumania, then it is 
that every true patriot deplores as he never 
deplored before — the broken fellowship which 
led to the evils of 191 4, the " hidden scourge " 
which affects our population, the ravages of 
drink in the nation ; the overcrowding of the 
slums in our great cities and the thousands in 
the country who live without any open ac- 
knowledgment of God. Here we are, called to 

S5 



* What wilt Thou have Me to do ? ' 

a long and hard struggle to see the war through 
to the bitter end (for never must we leave it 
to be done all over again by our children) ; 
called to sacrifice our every comfort and even 
what we think necessities in ordinary times, 
while our men are daily sacrificing their lives ; 
called when the war is over, to shine like 
a great star with an overwhelming influence 
in the world we have never had before, and 
because we are called to do this, therefore we 
are all the more bound as a nation to ask : 
'' Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do ! " 
How can I be worthy of this position ? If 
what we say and do and think is to influence 
the whole human race, as what the British 
Empire of the future says and does and thinks 
will influence the whole world, then can we 
be too careful that the religion we practice is 
the true religion, that the morality we profess 
reflects the will of God, and that the social 
condition of our own country shall be at least 
some reflection of the human brotherhood 
without which the world at large can never 
be a kingdom of God ? 

" What wilt Thou have me to do ? " We are 
bound to ask it first as a nation, and a voice 
seems to come at once from Heaven : " Come 

S6 



* What wilt Thou have Me to do ? ' 

back to God as a nation ; know Him in your 
homes ; worship Him in the houses set apart 
for the glory of His Holy Name ; abolish the 
false double standard of morality for men and 
women which has obtained too long ; let rich 
and poor work together in loving brotherhood ; 
let Capital and Labour cease their eternal 
wrangle ; I gave to the children of men plenty 
of land, plenty of water, plenty of food and 
plenty of air ; start again to see if human 
mismanagement and greed need always spoil 
the distribution ; it is the law of human life 
to work, but the fruits of industry are quite 
sufficient to sustain you all. 

" What will I have thee to do ? Accept for 
the first time in the history of the country, 
the full Christian law of love, and you shall 
have a brotherhood at home which shall con- 
vince the world of the beauty and reality of a 
Kingdom of God on earth." 

(2) But is the Church to do nothing ? Why ! 
as you know, we have said from the beginning 
of the National Mission, that the Church 
must repent first, and for the same reason as 
the nation, because of the glorious thing which 
it might be. 

The Church has in many ways come out 

57 



' What wilt Thou have Mc to do ? ' 

splendidly during the war ; it has poured out 
its choirs, its guilds ; its servers ; four thou- 
sand clergy offered as chaplains during the first 
week of the war ; thirty priests in the Navy and 
Army have already * given their lives, besides 
those who have been wounded. But because 
we have done this, are we not also to say unto 
the nation : " What wilt Thou have me to 
do ? " 

There is dawning before the Church of this 
country the most glorious prospect ; always 
Catholic really, she has discovered to the full 
her Catholic treasures, while still passionately 
Protestant against the claims of domination 
from Rome. 

As Bishop Lightfoot said in his last sermon, 
" Under the Church which has unbroken 
orders in one hand and the open Bible in 
the other, Christendom will one day be 
reunited." 

She still has her unbroken orders and the 
open Bible, and is showing herself to-day a 
true missionary force. If she had always led 
the mission work of the country as she leads it 
now, the millions of Wesleyans would be in the 

* Up to the end of 191 5. This has now risen to over 
sixty. 

58 



* What wilt Thou have Mc to do ? ' 

Church of England to-day. Why should they 
not come back ? * 

Then again the great Russian Church is 
looking with love and affection upon the 
Catholic Church of its great ally ; Bishop 
Bury's wonderful reception in Russia in 191 5 
was meant to express something far more than 
affection for himself, and although there are 
no signs of it at present, we cannot believe 
that the millions of devout Roman Catholics 
are going to continue for ever that official 
attitude towards the great Eastern Church and 
ourselves which has for so long rent the seamless 
robe of Christ. 

But, if Bishop Lightfoot's prophecy is ever 
to be fulfilled, then the Church must also ask : 
" What wilt Thou have me to do ? " As an 
outcome of the Mission a strong committee 
is already about to be appointed to work out 
the whole matter of Church Reform. The 
bishops themselves are only too ready to change 
anything whatever in their own manner of 
living which the Church may consider hinders 
its work, and a ruthless hand should be laid 
in this great day upon scandals of administra- 

* Conferences are being held with this object this very 
month, January 1918. 

59 



' What wilt Thou have Me to do ? ' 

tion or method, which have retarded too long 
its efficiency and power. What the Holy 
Spirit shows the Church in this tremendous 
day that it should do, and that without fear 
and favour it must do. 

(3) But then comes the really personal ques- 
tion, and for each one of us to ask : " What 
wouldst Thou have me to do ? " It is only too 
sadly easy to talk at large as to what the nation 
and the Church are to do, but no one is really 
touched by the Mission who does not ask : 
" What wilt Thou have me to do ? " And here 
the great complexity of such a congregation 
makes an answer difficult to suggest. The 
youngest choir boy present must have some 
mission resolution in his mind : " I will try 
to keep my thoughts from wandering in church. 
I will sing — as Jenny Lind said — ' I will sing 
for Jesus Christ.' " 

But what of the business man among you, 
tired with his week's work ? Well ! I can tell 
you what one business man has resolved to 
do — to give up manufacturing what he now 
understands from the Mission does harm to 
the world ; and the sacrifice will cost him some 
hundreds a year. Again, a partner of a great 
manufacturing firm said to me the other day, 

60 



* What wilt Thou have Me to do ? ' 

" A far larger proportion of the profits of all 
industries must go to wages than ever have 
gone before ; but of course it must be matched 
by the giving up of the doctrine, as economically- 
unsound as it is morally indefensible, that the 
workman restricts himself to a certain rate of 
output laid down by his Union." 

The new country that is to be can only be 
produced by sacrifice, as the world was re- 
deemed on Calvary by sacrifice, and as it is 
being saved by sacrifice on the battlefields of 
Europe to-day : 

" No easy hopes or lies 

Shall bring us to our goal, 
But iron sacrifice 

Of body, will and soul." 

But, if the world is to be saved eventually 
from war altogether the world' must be con- 
verted ; " They shall not hurt or destroy in 
all My holy mountain," when the earth is " filled 
with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters 
cover the sea," but how can it be done ? 

Others must say : " I will give up then my 
well-paid post here and go out to India or 
China as a teacher or a medical missionary ! " 

These were the kind of resolutions which 
followed the first day of Intercession for 

6i 



' What wilt Thou have Me to do ? ' 

Foreign Missions. These are the resolutions 
which must be made again to-day. 

Some may have to begin at the beginning : 
" I will begin to pray again, I will come and 
be confirmed, I will come back to my Com- 
munion ; I will start Family Prayer ; I will 
cut off this cursed temptation which has spoilt 
my life." 

All I plead for now, in what must be a 
compressed appeal in the midst of a long service, 
" For God's sake, decide on something ; " let 
there be something to show for being allowed 
to live in a day of God, and when the Great 
Day comes at last, may it find in a changed 
nation, a changed Church and a changed 
character the marks of the Fire which has been 
sent from Heaven in answer to prayer during 
the National Mission to purify and cleanse the 
world. 



^2 



IV 
REALITIES * 

I. The Power of the Cross 

" God forbid that I should glory, save in the Cross of 
our Lord Jesus Christ, by Whom the world is crucified 
unto me, and I unto the world." — Gal. vi. 14. 

The Cross 

There is one thing which has come to its own 
during the war and that is The Cross. 

It is not too much to say that before the 
war the language about the Cross was losing, 
to many, its reality ; the old language was 
being used but : 

'* It was all a tale of little meaning, 
Though the words were strong." 

Some even of the clergy felt it hard to speak 
in the same moving way as they felt the 

* Addresses delivered at St. Martin's in the Fields, 
Advent 1916. These addresses, given in the dinner hour to 
the large congregations all of whom have to return to their 
offices on the stroke of time, are necessarily given in a short 
and compressed form. 

63 



Realities 

subject demanded, and gradually a gospel of 
social betterment or rational philosophy took 
the place of the old preaching of the Cross. 
But what a difference these two and a half 
years have made, and just as again and again 
the cross or crucifix is the one thing left 
standing in the chaos and ruin of France and 
Belgium, so the one thing left standing in this 
welter of war is the Cross. 

I. And this has come about for several 
reasons. 

(i) In the first place, the alternate gospel 
of scientific advance and Rationalist philosophy 
has proved the most disastrous failure. 

It is an old story upon which we need not 
dwell again ; it was a very attractive gospel 
and it was leading away many in this country, 
but Cardinal Mercier could tell us better than 
anyone, all that it was able to do in his beloved 
Belgium ; it has gone to its grave amid the 
execration of the civilised world. Whatever 
else may be going to save and ennoble mankind, 
we shall never hear again of the Superman, 
nor imagine that scientific progress is by itself 
going to save the world. 

(2) But, by itself, this would not have been 
enough, if the contrary gospel had not sud- 

64 



Realities 

denly shown a stability and inspiration amid 
the falling debris of materialism, and against 
the background of a world in flames. Nothing 
has made great neutral nations like Japan 
believe in the reality of the Cross, as seeing 
our nation live up to its profession. The expect- 
ation that heathen nations would talk about the 
break down of Christianity was natural but 
has been proved absolutely false. 

(3) Then came the advent of the war and 
the world had plenty of opportunity of 
watching the Cross at the opening of the war, 
and testing its effect. 

A great cross was carried by a priest in 
front of every Russian regiment, and the motto 
given by the Czar was the motto of the Cross : 
" Greater love hath no man than this, that 
a man lay down his life for his friends." 

What result has this had ? Not a woman 
or child touched, not a church injured, not 
a civilian interfered with as the great Crusade 
entered Poland. 

While, at the other side of Europe, the 
sober pages of the most self-restrained man 
in Europe, Lord Bryce, reveals to a horrified 
world the results of an anti-Christian gospel 
of " Might is Right." 

F 65 



Realities 

(4) The months pass on, and tale after tale 
of heroism is sent home, and at last the most 
moving tale of all, the pictures of what our 
men are bearing to save the freedom of the 
world. 

And Sir H. Newbolt has told us in words 
which cannot be surpassed what these pictures 
have done. 

"O living pictures of the dead, 

O songs without a sound, 
O fellowship whose phantom tread 

Hallows a phantom ground, 
How in a dream have these revealed 

The faith I had not found ! " * 

In Other words the Cross to a thousand 
households becomes intelligible ; the precious 
blood of their dearest boy mingles with the 
Precious Blood which flowed in Calvary ; 
again the world is being redeemed by precious 
blood. " Christ did what my boy did ; my boy 
imitated what Christ did " they say. 

(5) In a flash the Cross becomes the only 
true consolation for mourners — even the life 
after death would be not enough if their dear 
one had not nobly and worthily died, and if 

* These lines refer to the effect of the first film matinees 
of the Somme battle. 



Realities 

they die by the side of the Son of God, they 
die nobly indeed. 

" I am so proud of my husband," said a 
young widow who was in this church on 
Saturday at the Memorial Service, and she 
is proud really because he died for his friends. 

(6) But the comfort goes much deeper than 
to the mourner — it is the one thing which 
saves everyone's faith in God. 

As you receive the boys into your arms from 
the trenches and lay them down in their agony, 
the one thing which enables you to look up 
to God and bless Him and not curse Him is 
the Cross. 

" He suffered too." " I thirst," He said. 
He too lay upon the hard ground. 

He is no crowned Apollo who never dipped 
his finger in the world's anguish, but " a Man 
of sorrows and acquainted with grief." 

If there are here to-day some who are dis- 
tressed about the war, who are losing their 
faith, who have lost the light of their eyes — 
I pray them to look up to-day and see standing 
among the ruins and shining with a strange 
mysterious light, the Cross. 

To-day, if never before, " The Cross of 
Christ is more to us than all His miracles." 

67 



Realities 

II. But, if this is so, as we look into the past 
or face the present, still more clearly does the 
Cross shine out as we peer into the future. 

What is going to be the outcome of it all ? 

What is even going to enable us to win 
the war ? 

We are checked at every point by human 
selfishness, class suspicion, and a long-cherished 
notion that a man's life consisteth in the 
abundance of things which he possesseth ; we 
look forward to a new country, a new empire, 
a new Church, and a new world. Let us face 
the fact at once, there is no possibility of 
getting any of the four, without the Cross. 

(i) A new brotherhood is impossible in 
this country without immense sacrifice, the 
employers giving up perhaps as much as a 
third of their profits to wages, and wage- 
earners giving up the false economic doctrine 
that you can make money by restricting output. 

But it is only when each class face facts at 
the foot of the Cross that we shall ever melt 
down this deep-rooted suspicion. 

The beautiful brotherhood in the trenches 
must be reproduced at home. 

(2) Nor can there be a new Church until 
all self-will and prejudice are eliminated and 

68 



Realities 

every dividing principle really looked at as it 
was seen on Calvary. 

(3) A new empire can only be attained 
when thousands forego the comforts of home 
to go out to build up new homes in Canada 
and Australia, and priests in peaceful vicar- 
ages at home go out with them to give them 
the Word and Sacraments. 

(4) There can be no new world until, not in 
ones but hundreds, men and women will go out 
and teach the outcasts in Madras or the milhons 
in China. 

III. But there are many grounds of hope 
that this may be so. 

(i) Man finds he is born for the Cross. 
" I was never so happy in my Hfe," wrote a 
man who had tasted the joy of service for the 
first time. 

(2) The wonderful cheerfulness of the 
wounded and suffering. 

(3) The mysterious strength given to the 
mourners. 

(4) The strange change which has come over 
men not impressed at home. 

In the midst of the surrounding darkness, 
the Cross is in the field, and when we all have 
really followed the Cross, not only will victory 

69 



Realities 

crown our arms, but there will at last dawn 
upon an astonished world, the new kingdom 
Christ and our boys have died to win. 



REALITIES 

II. The Strength and Depth of the Bible 

" Thy righteousness standeth like the strong mountains ; 
Thy judgments are like the great deep." — Ps. xxxvi. 6, 

The great danger of being too near a thing 
is that you cannot see it in all its proportions, 
and the still greater danger of being too 
familiar with a thing is that you often fail to 
see how great it is. Take, for instance, the 
mountains and the sea. If you live very near 
a great mountain, you cannot see it in its true 
proportions at all. You might easily be per- 
suaded that a little hillock which you could see 
at a distance from your window was as big as 
the mighty mountain under which you habitu- 
ally dwelt. And so again with the mighty 
sea. I have known people who have lived by 
the sea who have lost all sense of its mystery 
and majesty; they are too busy to notice its 
varying colours ; they ignore its marvellous 
depths and its hidden wonders, and because 

70 



Realities 

they see the children paddling in the waves 
on the beach, forget that it is the same sea 
which, roused to the grandeur of its full 
wrath, can wreck an Armada, and save the 
freedom of the world. 

I am led to make these reflections by trying 
to find some parallel to what the Bible means to 
us, and it is of course the very reflection made 
by the Psalmist all those hundreds of years 
ago : " Thy righteousness standeth like the 
strong mountains ; Thy judgments are like 
the great deep." 

I. The Bible has all the strength and virility 
and grandeur of the mountains, and all the 
depth and variety and saltness of the sea, 
and yet to thousands all this is lost upon them 
because they are so near to this mountain and 
so famiUar with this sea. Let me ask you at 
once — how constantly do you read the Bible ? 
When you do read it, do you feel as you do 
when you are looking at a glorious mountain 
view or drinking in fresh draughts of Hfe from 
the invigorating sea ? and if not, why not ? 
For if there is one thing which has come to 
its own, during the war, it is the Bible. 

(i) Its warnings have come true. 

The Psalms have had a new meaning to 
71 



Realities 

thousands of us. We had grown to take little 
interest in the description of overwhelming 
pride, the cruelty of it and its inevitable fall, 
until we saw a proud nation make a bid for 
the empire of the world and so nearly succeed 
that we brace ourselves, as the Psalmist did, 
upon the thought of the far greater strength 
of God. 

Or we hear the denunciations of those " who 
add sin to sin," " who rob the hireling of his 
wages," " who go down to Egypt for help and 
put their trust only in chariots and horses." 
But it is not until we find ourselves crippled 
in our righteous cause, by those who add 
Drink to Lust and Lust to Drink ; by the broken 
fellowship in the nation which leads to per- 
petual war between Capital and Labour, and 
by the thousands in the nation who never 
worship or acknowledge God at all — it is not 
till then that we know the Bible is right in 
its warnings. 

(2) We have found in it inspiration to make 
us play the man. You won't find a word in 
the Bible about war being glorious for its own 
sake, but you will find that the Bible from end 
to end incites you to take your stand by the 
weak against the strong. It is a strong and 

72 



Realities 

virile book ; the New Testament virtues of 
meekness and unselfishness presuppose and are 
superadded to the Old Testament virtues of 
courage, fortitude and perseverance in a noble 
task ; Christ Himself was the most perfect 
and knightly character in the whole history 
of Chivalry, and the one shadow that never 
darkened his splendid feat of arms was fear. 

No wonder the soldier has taken his Bible 
into battle as the soldier's special friend. 

(3) But, if its strength and virility have 
shone out, so has its power to comfort. While 
it is the soldier's trumpet, it is the mourner's 
pillow. There has been many a Bible these 
past three years wet with happy tears. 

" The souls of the righteous are in the hands 
of God, there shall no torment touch them ; 
in the sight of the unwise they seem to die and 
their departure is taken for misery, but they 
are in peace." 

" I am the Resurrection and the Life ; he 
that beheveth in Me, though he die, yet shall 
he live, and whoso trusteth and believeth on 
Me, shall never die." 

" Those who are alive shall not prevent 
them that are asleep, for the dead in Christ 
shall rise first ; then shall we who are alive be 

73 



Realities 

caught up to meet the Lord in the air, and 
so shall v\ie ever be with the Lord — wherefore 
comfort ye one another with these words," 

We do comfort one another with these 
words, and we pillow our heads on these 
promises and assurances, and as we do, God 
giveth His beloved sleep, and but for the 
Bible there would be no rest at all for the 
tortured soul of man. Truly " God's right- 
eousness standeth like the strong mountains," 
and never did we realise till now the truth of 
its warnings, the manliness of its teaching and 
the strength of its comfort. 

IL But, if the righteousness of God which 
is portrayed in the Bible is like the strong 
mountains, His judgments recorded in it are 
like the great deep. 

(i) It is only familiarity — fatal familiarity 
which has bred contempt — which prevents us 
from seeins: this wonderful fact that the Bible 
is like the ocean in this special respect, that 
while it is shallow enough for children to wade 
in and enjoy, it is deep enough for the most 
learned to get soon out of their depths. 

People sometimes thoughtlessly laugh about 
Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, for- 
getting that the Bible was meant for the 

74 



Realities 

childhood of the world. Would a^ chapter on 
protoplasm have been more useful for that 
purpose ? 

" Picture, prove, persuade," are supposed to 
be the secrets of eloquence. First " picture " 
and it is the vivid pictures in the Bible which 
give it its eternal charm to the childhood of 
the world. While, on the other hand, you 
will see an old scholar hke Bishop Westcott 
or Dr. Swete still toiling on with unexhausted 
interest, trying to fathom the depths of the 
unfathomable truth which lies hid in the book 
which contains the Word of God. 

Here is the whole secret, it contains the 
Word of God ; all difficulties raised about the 
Bible forget this fundamental fact ; it is written 
by men ; it is written by many men ; it is 
written in sundry times and in divers manners, 
and therefore it is coloured by the prejudices 
and even mistakes of the men who wrote, but 
all the time the Spirit of God used them ; 
they spoke as moved by the Holy Ghost, and 
therefore deep and unfathomable as the depths 
of ocean, Hes the Truth of God which it 
contains ; His judgments are like the great 
deep. 

(2) But, if it is at once as shallow and deep 
75 



Realities 

as the ocean, so also does it show the ocean's 
changing colour. 

You have seen the ocean smiling like a merry 
child — one of the most famous descriptions in 
an ancient poet speaks of the " unnumbered 
smile of ocean" — you have seen it frown in 
angry froth and foam ; you have seen it still 
with an impenetrable peace. 

But so also with the Bible ; there are no such 
ringing notes of joy as you will find in the 
Bible : " When the Lord turneth the captivity 
of Sion , then were we like unto them that dream. 
Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and 
our tongue with joy." 

But let the impenitent sinner try to push 
on his way Hke Balaam, then Hke an angel 
with the drawn sword in his hand stands the 
Church with the Bible in its hand ; he finds 
" the Word of God sharper than any two-edged 
sword, smiting asunder to the joints and 
marrow." 

(3) But we have not fully appreciated the 
likeness of the Bible to the great deep, if we 
leave out the salt which while it dashes into 
the eyes sometimes and makes them sting, is an 
enduring element which keeps the world fresh. 

" I always read out a bit of the Bible in my 

76 



Realities 

school," said a schoolmaster to me years ago, 
" it seems to keep the air fresh." 

" Let your speech be always with grace, 
seasoned with salt." 

" Have salt in yourselves and be at peace 
one with another." 

Nowhere shall we get the salt into ourselves 
better than studying the Bible. 

III. Now how do we stand with regard to 
the Bible to-day ? 

(i) Do we really imagine that the Bible is 
" played out " ? Never was the Bible stronger 
than it is to-day; just because we know now 
better when the books were written ; just 
because the intellect of Europe has been 
fastened on the Bible for the last fifty years, 
all the more clearly do we know to-day, how 
strong is it as a mountain, and how deep as a 
deep ! 

Many mistakes have been purged away, but 
always mistakes which men made about the 
Bible, not mistakes in' the Bible itself ; many 
misunderstandings have been cleared up, but 
you are yourselves making the misunderstanding 
of your lives, if you think that a single criticism 
has really touched a vital truth. 

(2) Or are you one of those who affect to 

11 



Realities 

despise tKe Bible because you are a good 
Churchman ? This distinction between the 
Church and the Bible is a wholly modern 
thing ; the Church brings us the Bible in 
its hand as its most treasured possession; it 
existed before the Bible because it was members 
of the Church who wrote the Bible, and the 
Bible describes with touching clearness the 
beginning and early struggles of the Church. 

But the idea that in later days we were to 
be split up into Church Christians and Bible 
Christians is a modern and totally erroneous 
idea. " The Church to teach, and the Bible 
to prove " is the motto of the Church of 
England, and nothing may be taught as 
essential to eternal salvation except what may 
be proved by certain warrant of Holy Scripture ; 
there is no other branch of the Church which 
reads in public four passages of Holy Scripture 
in her daily services, and Dr. Liddon was 
surely right in calling them " letters from 
Heaven." 

(3) No ! what we want more than anything 
else to-day, is not criticism of the Bible, but 
study of it, intellectually and devotionally ; 
intellectually, so as to be saved from foolish 
mistakes, and above all devotionally. What we 

7« 



Realities 

need is to get down upon our knees with it, 
and meditate upon its height and its depth ; 
what will help us in life and comfort us in 
death will be to read again and again its 
warnings, its hopes, its promises ; to take the 
Bible into the heart is not only to take in a 
fount of English undefiled, but a strength of 
character and a depth of vision which can be 
received in no other way. 

(4) And above all, it is our bounden duty to 
multiply, translate and send throughout the 
world the book which, taught by a loving 
and believing Church has meant to thousands 
nothing less than life from the dead. 

No doubt for a time there was a prejudice 
against the British and Foreign Bible Society 
in the minds of some Churchmen ; and if it 
was really imagined that the Bible was meant 
to do its work without the living voice, that 
prejudice might be justified. But it is the 
handmaid of every Missionary Society in the 
whole world ; its work is wonderful. 

It has translated the Scriptures into every 
known language, and it is as the necessary 
handmaid of all the Societies that I commend 
its work to your generosity to-day. 



79 



Realities 

REALITIES 

III. The Church 

" That He might present it to Himself a glorious Church, 
not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing ; but that 
it should be holy and without blemish." — Ephks. v. 27. 

There are few more mischievous distinctions 
which have been drawn in recent years than 
the distinction which has been drawn between 
the Church and the Bible. Every instructed 
Churchman simply loves his Bible ; he finds 
in it the grandeur and width and strength of 
a mountain ; the health-giving power, the 
versatility and the depth of the sea ! The 
righteousness of God described in it, standeth 
like the strong mountains ; His judgments like 
the great deep. 

But the fact remains that the Church is 
the body to which Christ trusted the task 
of converting the world — it was to preparing a 
Church He devoted the greater part of His 
ministry, and it was with almost a cry of joy 
that He exclaimed when at last He had found 
a rock on which He could build, in the few 
who at last really understood — that He cried, 
" On this rock I will build my Church, and the 
gates of Hell shall not prevail against it." It 

80 



Realities 

was the Church which He addressed with His 
latest breath " Go ye into all the world and 
preach the Gospel to every creature " 

But alas ! it was a Church very different 
to anything we see in the world to-day • it 
was to be a Church without spot or wrinkle 
or any such thmg ! It was to be a united 
Church, so united that the world was to be 
Trrt °^*^^.U--ty of God by the Unitv 
of the Church ; ,t was to be so loving that all 
the heathen were to say, "See how these 
Christians love one another ; " it was to be so 
generous that no one could really look on 
anything as his own, when any brother lacked 
what he needed ; so missionary that the only 
two ap ues in a certain place were sent away 
without complaint on a missionary journey 

In a powerful book I was reading the other 
day, a chapter was headed " Wanted-a 
Church, and I beheve that the title expresses 
n a paradox the need of to-day; it is one of 
the discoveries of the war-that what the 
world needs is a Church. 

I. There can be little doubt that if there 
had been in the world such a Church as this- 

(I) In the first place, there would have been 
no war at all ; so great by this time would have 



Realities 

been the influence of such a Church that the 
pagan Gospel of " Might is Right " could not 
have grown up, as it has grown up, in its 
presence. 

(2) If in spite of it war had broken out, 
such a Church would have made impossible 
the horrors of it which have scandalised 
humanity ; its intervention would have meant 
something very different from the feeble 
remonstrances of the Pope, from the apparent 
endorsement of crime by the Lutheran Church 
of Germany, or from the powerlessness of the 
protest of our own Church which naturally 
has been only able to affect and keep Christian 
and chivalrous the conduct of our own soldiers. 

(3) In all probability, such a Church would 
at least have made war impossible for the 
future. " They shall not hurt or destroy in 
all my holy mountain, when the earth is filled 
with the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters 
cover the sea " — such a united, loving, generous 
and missionary Church would not take long 
to convert the world. 

II. And therefore we are bound to ask 
to-day, How are we to recover this glorious 
Church, without spot or wrinkle or any such 
thing, of which the world caught a glimpse 

82 



Realities 

for a few short years, but which has vanished 
like " a dream when one awaketh " ? 

(i) The first and most obvious thing which 
must happen is that its divisions must be 
healed. Instead of being a symbol of unity and 
a proof of the oneness of God, it has become 
a synonym for discord and a field for perhaps 
the most bitter and unscrupulous quarrels 
which have divided the world in its long 
history ; the odium theologicum is the worst 
hatred of all. It is a trial to the faith of 
many, that one nation like Germany to enforce 
its idea of unity under German influence 
should have been allowed by God to have 
plunged the world into chaos, but I confess 
it is even more a trial to my faith that the 
Roman Church should have been allowed by 
God to try to enforce precisely the same 
claim spiritually, as Germany makes physically 
(bolstered up by documents believed for two 
hundred years to be genuine, now known to 
be forgeries), and so has broken up the 
Church and plunged it into chaos ! 

Neither can be successful, for the spirit of 
nationality is as strong in Churches as in 
nations, but it is undoubtedly this persistent 
claim which breaks up the peace of the 



Realities 

Church to-day. Few will deny that in saying 
this I lay my finger upon the one real rock of 
offence ; the difference between East and 
West of the Procession of the Spirit from or 
through the Son is quite capable of mutual 
explanation ; the return of the separated 
bodies to the scriptural order of the Episcopate 
is quite possible with a little mutual give and 
take. 

But the one unauthorised claim which, while 
made, will always rend the seamless robe of 
Christ, is the claim that one branch of the 
Church is the whole Church, and that no 
ministry is valid which does not owe its 
authority to and claim its sanction from the 
Bishop of Rome. 

It really is enough to make the angels weep 
to think of what the Church might have been 
to-day, with all the stately ceremonial of Rome, 
the gorgeous music of the Russian Church, 
and the simple piety of its peasant members ; 
the doctrinal strength of the Presbyterians, the 
fiery zeal of the Wesleyans ; the intellectual 
keenness of many of the Congregationalists and 
Baptists ; and the mission fervour and spiritual 
devotion of the Anglican Church as it is to-day, 
all poured into one channel of molten glory 

84 



Realities 

to change and ennoble and purify the world : 
Truly the world is hungering for a united 
Church. 

(2) But it would not be enough to have it 
united — it must renew its youth — it must be 
always young. It must have " no spot or 
wrinkle or any such thing." No jealousy 
among its members must mar its working ; 
no self-seeking, must lower its priesthood ; 
there must be no bad spots in it where no work 
is being done ; there must be no wrinkle of 
ugly despair or hopelessness ; it must be always 
to the end " as a bride which adorneth herself 
with her jewels " and with the face of the 
morning. 

Who will give the Church back her youth, 
her hope and her love ? Who will burn up 
the long past of misunderstandings, and all 
the bitter party spirit of to-day, and give us 
back the Church as she left her Lord's Hand 
and as she will have to be if the Bridegroom is 
to come again to claim His Bride ? Truly 
the Holy Spirit with His recreating power 
must begin upon the Church. Only a re- 
created, rejuvenated Church can revive the 
world. 

(3) But there is even more to seek than 

8s 



Realities 

union and mutual love, the glorious Church 
must be unworldly. " My Kingdom is not 
of this world." It has to be in this world ; 
it has to grapple with all the problems of this 
world ; it has to be sunk in the world as leaven 
is sunk in the dough, as salt is laid on the meat, 
but it is never to take its tone from the world ; 
it has never to lower its moral teaching to the 
talk of the smoking-room, its religion to the 
religion of the society drawing-room. 

It is never to be a sphere for a successful 
career but always a field for lowly service ; 
its idol is never to be the " popular man " ; its 
hero is to be the selfless, deserted and often 
for a time unpopular priest. 

The Church of the parish is not to be run 
like a successful concert-room but to be like 
its Master among rich and poor " as one that 
serveth " — serving with a crown of thorns. 

(4) But there is one more note of a glorious 
Church, essential to its glory, and that is, it 
must be missionary. 

It is never really still, though outwardly 
calm ; it thirsts for men like its Master ; you 
must not be able to glut its spiritual hunger 
or tire out its zeal ; it rests by the well but 
even then there is the Samaritan woman, and 

S6 



Realities 

even to the quiet place apart the multitude 
find their way. 

III. Now with an urgency probably greater 
than anv other to-day, the question must 
be faced how can we produce, or restore or 
recreate for the world, this glorious Church, 
without spot or wrinkle or any such thing. 

(1) First, by believing in its possibiHty. It 
may take a long time ; so far as this country 
is concerned, the reuniting of all the separated 
bodies into one body is an immense step 
towards their reuniting with the mother 
Church of England which once they left ; 
the war is joining us in bonds of mutual re- 
spect and admiration vdth the Russian Church, 
which knew little of us before. 

When once we have realised what conquering 
the sin of the world really means — perhaps the 
realisation of the danger will draw us together 
against a common foe. 

(2) And having believed, for instance, in 
unity, let us work together to bring it about ; 
let all things be said or done in charity. Let 
no one think that what I have said about the 
Roman theory being the rock of offence was 
said from want of charity. I have the pro- 
foundest admiration for the devotion of Jesuit 

87 



Realities 

missionaries ; for the humble and devoted 
lives of individual Roman Catholics ; I have 
no doubt that they honestly believe what they 
are told ; w^e must never despair that by 
charity and mutual explanation, the truth may 
one day prevail. 

(3) We must determine that so far as our 
own particular parish is concerned the Church 
has no spot or wrinkle or any such thing ; that 
so far, say, as our deanery is concerned every 
force for good is recognised and owned, and 
that with regard to the next parish, we " look 
not every man on his own things but every 
man also on the things of others " ; and that 
the diocese is the unit of the Church, not the 
parish. 

(4) We must pray for a missionary spirit 
and pray for it together ; it is the corporate 
life of the Church which wants reviving ; the 
Church is too often a collection of individuals ; 
the diocese a collection of individual Churches. 
One reason that I am going round the diocese 
myself, deanery by deanery, is to ask the 
Church, as it has knelt in corporate penitence, 
now to take corporate action to save the world. 

Let our prayer be " Come, Holy Spirit, 
fill the Church again. Remember not the 

88 



Realities 

sins and offences of our youth, but according 
to Thy mercy, look Thou upon us, O Lord, 
for Thy goodness " ; in order that so, when 
the great Advent of Christ comes at last, 
the Church of His love, gathering up her 
splendid limbs and with her face towards the 
dawn, may rise in all her youth and strength 
to meet Him. 



89 



KNOWING THE LORD * 

" They shall teach no more every man his neighbour and 
every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord ; for they 
shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest, 
saith the Lord." — Jer. xxxi. 34. 

The war has given us many revelations and 
inspired us with many hopes. It has revealed 
(i) That no man can live without God. 
" Nothing does any good out here but prayer, 
and trust in God. War is a great purge," 
writes a young man home from the trenches. 
When a man is face to face time after time 
with instant death, things take their true 
proportions — God and the soul, the soul and 
God — they are the only realities in the world. 
(2) But so also has a great revelation come to 
those at home. When the dear boy has gone, 
the only thing which seems to matter is whether 
we shall see him again ; when the widowed 
wife looks in vain for the letter which never 
comes, there is one longing in her heart to 

* A rallying cry at a Church Army service. 
90 



Knowing the Lord 

know that her husband is aHve ; that he still 
loves her ; that she will see him again. 

All the things which occupied so much time 
and thought in the old days — social functions, 
dress, petty little ambitions — seem lost in the 
distance ; if the Lord alone can restore me 
my beloved, let me learn to know the Lord. 

(3) But the revelation has not been solely our 
need of God, the war has revealed how few 
have really found Him. When we are told 
that the most successful chaplain in the Navy 
has twenty communicants on a ship of a 
thousand men, or ask the chaplains in charge 
of the great camps at home how many they 
have Sunday by Sunday at the Holy Com- 
munion, or study the percentage of those who 
attend Church in any district out of the 
population of the parish, we cannot deny 
that we have at present failed to make the 
people, in the full sense, know the Lord. 

(4) But may we not go further and say that 
the war has revealed to us all how little we 
ourselves have known the Lord. 

Are there none of you whose faith is going 
down like a pack of cards under the stress of 
the war itself ? Are there none saying that 
God is dead ; that Christianity has broken 

91 



Knowing the Lord 

down ; that the righteous have been forsaken ; 
that their seed are, as a matter of fact, begging 
their bread ? or asking, " What about the 
unoffending Belgians, and the brave Serbians ? " 
What about the discomfort and poverty which 
on some, though not all, the war has entailed ? 

Yes, no doubt, the war has been like one of 
those great flash-lights we see so often in 
London, piercing through the darkness, and 
reveahng things as they are, death, life, God, 
the soul. Faith, Hope, Love — we see the only 
things which abide when everything else is 
burnt up, and have to lament our scanty share 
of what turns out now to be the true riches. 

But this very fact is the first of the new 
hopes which are springing up to-day. 

(i) The very recognition of the facts is the 
first hopeful sign ; if it is true that God 
resisteth the proud and giveth grace to the 
humble, then the very self-abasement, the 
humility which have come over nations. 
Church and individuals, is the best sign. 

When we talk of national repentance we do 
not mean that we have not an absolutely 
righteous cause, but that in order to be used 
effectively by God in it, we must empty our- 
selves, and begin again. 

92 



Knowing the Lord 

(2) Then again, when we really face the 
matter, we see no real reason why all should 
not know ; the most unlikely men have been 
converted in the trenches — " few of us do 
not say a prayer," occurred in a letter the 
other day — what we believe is that all can 
know the Lord ; we have sat down too long 
under a few handfuls of devout people in 
every parish " knowing the Lord," we have 
despaired of the hundreds who never go to 
Church, but we are going to despair no longer ; 
it is faithless not to believe that all can know 
the Lord from the lowest to the greatest. 

(3) Think of the effect on London of such 
a thing as this. There are many who are 
most anxious that this Mission shall not leave 
out the social side, but social evils would 
vanish, the old cruel enmity between class and 
class, the perpetual fight between labour and 
capital, the misunderstanding creeping in before 
the war between men and women, the curse 
of drunken homes, the ravages of lust, would be 
a nightmare of the past if all should know 
the Lord. We know what it is perhaps to 
have one man or one woman in our acquaint- 
ance who is like Jesus Christ, what evils fly 
in his presence, the lion lies down with the 

93 



Knowing the Lord 

lamb and the Httle child leads them, the devils 
fly out of souls, the selfish become unselfish; 
the wild beast of lust crouches in his presence* 
is shamed into Love, and why ? 

Because he knows the Lord — he bows before 
the invisible ; there is One who, not having 
seen, he loves, and therefore round about him 
Heaven is begun. 

(4) Think of the Hope for the World. — To 
have everyone like that, to have a kingdom of 
Christs, to haye chivalry and charity the rule, 
and not the exception, this is the vision which 
is once more dawning on the world. A 
kingdom founded on Force is seen in all its 
native hideousness to-day, it has been given 
its full chance and the Europe of to-day is 
its result. Once again there has loomed up 
before the prophet's eye a kingdom founded 
on Love. " They shall not hurt or destroy 
in all my Holy Mountain ; for the earth shall 
be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as 
the waters cover the sea." 

This, at any rate, is the vision which inspires 
the National Mission. It may be summed up 
in these propositions : 

(i) To know the Lord is to be a changed 
man or woman. 

94 



Knowing the Lord 

(2) For all to know the Lord is to have a 
changed world. 

(3) All are capable of knowing the Lord, 
for they were made for the Lord and the Lord 
exists for them. 

(4) The Church exists to make the vision 
come true. 

No one imagines that the whole nation can 
attain to this in a moment, but we can at 
least make a determined beginning at once and 
sound a call to repentance and hope. 

And there are many things to encourage us. 
(i) Every priest once meant and vowed to live 
a life of unwavering devotion. 

The Holy Ghost fell upon him, and is in 
him still. This Mission is not to be accom- 
plished by great missioners who are to 
revive the Church ; the Church is to revive 
itself. 

Back to his vocation, back to his ordination 
vows, back to the Holy Spirit, invoked over 
him at his ordination, must come each of 
the twenty thousand priests of the Church 
of England, some of whom may seem to have 
drifted far away. That has been already the 
experience where the Mission has begun ; men 
who were thought dead and lifeless, and who 

95 



Knowing the Lord 

were out of heart, have become again " prophets 
of God." 

(2) But this is only the beginning, the Church 
is not the clergy ; you all received in your 
Confirmation the priesthood of the laity — 
and never yet have the confirmed of England 
come to their own. There is only one High 
Priest, Jesus Christ, but the Church is the 
Body of that Priest, and the whole Church 
is priestly. Claim and assert that priesthood ; 
offering daily the sacrifice of prayer and praise, 
pleading the one sacrifice, consecrating every 
day, living to save, the lay priests of the 
Church are to exercise their priesthood at 
last. 

Already we have seen a little cameo picture 
of what may be done. 

The Pilgrimage of Prayer was carried out 
in one diocese by twenty ladies, who, carrying 
their packs on their backs, walked from village 
to village, and stayed with the villagers. Set- 
ting up the Cross, they spoke simply and 
straightly to the hearts of the villagers, and 
the touching response they received is only 
an earnest of a harvest still to be reached 
when fifty thousand lay priests do the same. 
(3) But our ground of hope goes even deeper 

96 



Knowing the Lord 

than this — it is grounded on the latent Chris- 
tianity in the hearts of the EngHsh people. 

I know all that can be said on the other 
side, the few at present who attend Com- 
munion, the low standard of life which obtains 
among vast masses of men collected together ; 
but there is another side to it altogether : I 
have marched with a brigade through England 
whose presence was pronounced a blessing 
by the clergy of the county town where we 
were billeted, and against whom no single 
crime would appear on the crime sheet. 

Again, the officer who commands a Brigade, 
made up of our Church Lads' Brigade Old 
Boys,* has not had one crime against them, and 
their early morning Communions are a sight 
to see. - "• 

But what man who really knows the Hves 
of our London poor will not witness to the 
latent Christianity among them ? People 
smiled at the speech of a layman the other 
day who noted how readily the common 
soldier would sing hymns ; others scoff at the 
crowded Harvest Festival and Midnight Ser- 
vice as superstitions. But when it comes to 

* Terribly was this Brigade cut up later on in action, 
but it covered itself with glory. 

H 97 



Knowing 'the Lord 

some crisis in their Hves, you find that the 
Christianity believed in this country for so 
many years has filtered down into the hearts 
often of those who never go to Church or 
Chapel. 

(4) But one great hope is in the Power of 
God the Holy Ghost — without Him, no 
national call could go home at all, and that 
is why we must prepare the Church to give 
the call by gathering at the feet of Jesus 
Christ in the Spirit. 

Each parish might well have a parochial 
retreat before the autumn, that so with 
renewed faith and power, the band of those 
whose hearts God has touched may go forth 
and bring in the others. 

(5) And, lastly, our hope is a truer fellow- 
ship, " It came to pass that those that knew 
the Lord spake often one with another." 

We can overdo this national reserve of 
English men and English women. We must 
be bolder and more outspoken in our witness — 
this is the aim of the Laymen's and Laywomen's 
Christian Crusade. If Christianity is seen to 
mean more to those who do profess it, it is more 
likely to impress, by the attractiveness of its 
power, those outside its influence to-day. It 

98 



Knowing the Lord 

is then with such a vision we start upon our 
work to-day : it is said that where there is no 
vision the people perish, but out of the misery 
and sorrow of the war a vision has been found 
at last which shall make the people live — " all 
shall know the Lord from the least to the 
greatest." To fail in so great a cause as in 
the effort to^make that vision a reality is to 
fail gloriously ; to succeed is to gain the 
crown of life. 



99 



VI 

THE CONDITIONS OF VICTORY* 

" Till the day dawn, and the shadows flee away." — Song 
OF Sol. ii. 17. 

There are two views possible of the spirit in 
which we should enter upon a New Year in 
war time. 

In the first view the year opens with nothing 
but clouds and thick darkness. Not only is 
the night of war still upon us, but there is not 
even a streak of dawn. " More and more crimes 
have been committed by our enemy, and God 
has not raised a finger to punish them. There 
has been no such crime for a thousand years 
as the slow and deliberate extermination of the 
Armenian race, and the misery of the Serbian 
refugees is beyond description. We ourselves 
have made mistakes in policy and strategy 

* Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral on Sunday morning, 
January 2 (Day of National Intercession), 1916. 

100 



The Conditions of Victory 

which have lost us the confidence of the world.'* 
(This is the view of a pessimist which I am 
describing, not my own view.) " We would not 
believe that war was coming ; and when it 
did come, so little were we prepared that we 
were turning out one shell a day to the hundreds 
of the enemy. Even since we learnt the truth 
our efforts to redress the balance have been 
defeated and delayed by strikes, by clinging 
to old Trade Union rules, and by the desire 
of employers and employed to make as much 
out of the necessities of the country as they 
can. Our best and brightest boys are dead. 
One father was seen in a railway carriage in 
tears — which he tould not control. At first 
no notice was taken by the passengers, but at 
last a kindly fellow-passenger asked him very 
softly the cause of his grief. ' I am very 
sorry,' he said, ' to give way, but my five 
fine boys are killed, and I have just left my 
wife, as a consequence, in a lunatic asylum.' 
As in the days of the last plague in Egypt, 
there is scarcely a house in which there is not 
one dead. Christ is betrayed again, and no 
hand is uplifted to save Him. Judas is again 
out on his fell errand, and now, as before, it 
is night." 

lOI 



The Conditions of Victory 

No one can deny that this view of the ex- 
treme pessimist has something to say for itself. 
Few things are less helpful to-day than un- 
thinking optimism. As a merely short view 
of the- situation it is unanswerable. 

But in St. Paul's Cathedral we have no right 
to take short views. We meet under a great 
dome which speaks of eternity, of the magni- 
ficence, and the patience of God. We are 
worshipping in the Mother Church of an 
Empire whose " flag has braved a thousand 
years the battle and the breeze." We have 
no right to be content to be less hardy, less 
brave and less determined than our forefathers ; 
and still less have we the right to dishonour 
the cross which gleams at the top of this 
cathedral, the cross round which the martyrs 
died. And when we peer into the New Year 
from the vantage ground of St. Paul's Cathedral 
the outlook becomes a very different one. The 
facts recounted by the pessimist need not be, 
and in many cases cannot be, denied ; but 
there is one important Person left out of sight 
in the whole purview of the situation — and 
that is God Himself ! God Himself in His 
unconquerable strength and in His dazzling 
splendour ; God by whom all things were 

102 



The Conditions of Victory 

made in heaven and in earth — marvellous in 
His power, far-reaching in His judgment, but 
most v^^onderful of all in His humility ; God 
who speaks to us from the manger at Christmas, 
and from the Cross on Good Friday, but whose 
restrained majesty only bursts forth in full 
splendour upon Easter Day. 

It is God who makes all the difference. 
What does God think about it all ? — that is 
the only question worth asking.. God has no 
favourites. He is not the special God of the 
British Empire any more than He is of the 
German. He is the God of all the earth. No 
individual can escape His eye and no nation 
His judgment. His rules for the governance 
of the world are well known, and, up to a 
point, have been fully revealed ; and, when we 
understand them, a flood of new light is poured 
upon the future. 

In the first place, it is part of His education 
of the world that He never lets a nation or 
individual off the consequences of their mis- 
takes or does their work for them. To do so 
would be to treat them as slaves, and not 
children ; as puppets, and not men. The 
moment we understand this, the idea that we 
are under the ban of God, because we have 
103 



The Conditions of Victory 

not yet won the great war, is nothing short 
of absurd. 

Our youth was not trained to serve — in 
spite of the repeated warnings of the last great 
soldier we buried in this cathedral ; therefore 
we had to train them after the war had begun. 
The Navy was trained, alert, efficient, ready; 
therefore it rules the sea. This is exactly in 
accordance with the first law of God's govern- 
ance of the world. If there has been a miracle 
worked at all it has been the escape from a 
worse disaster than we have ever yet had. 
No general really knows, or can tell you, what 
stopped the avalanche sweeping over Paris. 
And, as far as our own country is concerned, 
the really astonishing thing has been the 
raising of three million men in eighteen months 
by voluntary enlistment. The surprise has 
been the outpouring of service both of men 
and of women from the heart of a nation which 
its enemies thought was lost in comfort and 
wrapped in ignoble ease. 

In the main nothing has happened which 
must not have happened when an unprepared 
nation, in however good a cause, met one 
which has prepared for the same struggle for 
forty years. What has happened is exactly 

104 



The Conditions of Victory 

what we should expect. The inevitable has 
happened ; and it is not part of God's plan in 
governing the world to stop the inevitable. 

But if that was all it would indeed be only 
negative comfort. The positive comfort is 
this — on one condition of which we will speak 
in a moment — God has never allowed devilry, 
lust, and tyranny finally to triumph in His 
world. Heaviness may endure for a night — 
and often the night is very long — but joy 
cometh in the morning. 

" The slow hours of darkness drag on their leaden way, 
But day dawns at last and the shadows flee away." 

We may then have serene and absolute 
confidence that while the God revealed in the 
Bible still lives, those who first betrayed and 
then ravished Belgium, those who sank the 
Lusitania, those who stood by while seven 
hundred and fifty thousand Armenians were 
done to death will be at last defeated. 

And what is the one condition ? That the 
nations which are to be the instruments of 
God's judgments are worthy to be weapons 
in His hands. That is why we have days of 
penitence and prayer. As God reaches down 
His hand to His quiver to find the weapon for 
105 



The Conditions of Victory 

the bow which He has made ready, He must 
find a weapon which He can use. Are we, as 
a nation, such a weapon ? That is the ques- 
tion for us to-day. There is a fine description 
of the ready weapon in a chapter of the prophet 
Isaiah : " He has made me Hke a poHshed shaft ; 
in His quiver has He hidden me." Are we 
such a pohshed shaft ? " He has prepared for 
Himself the instrument of death, He has bent 
His bow and made it ready." But what if 
we break in His hands ! What if He cannot 
send us, in the crisis of His great Day, straight 
to the goal ! Have we nothing to repent of ? 
Are we in a position to say : We thank Thee, 
O God, that we are not as other nations are, 
or even as these Germans ! What about our 
national Drink Bill ? What about the moral 
state of our streets in darkened London ? 
Worse than it has been for twenty years. 
What lies at the root of this eternal dispute 
between Capital and Labour ? 

No, the truth of the matter is this. If the 
one Day is to dawn, another must dawn too. 
The Day of Victory, if it is to come, is part of 
a larger Day. Our sons would have died in 
vain if the war was over and we went back 
to our old life again. We are apt to forget 

1 06 



The Conditions of Victory 

that before the great war began we were on 
the verge of civil war at home, and of an 
industrial revolution which some men thought 
would have been on a scale unknown in our 
history. A boy, one of five sons serving his 
country, wrote home to his mother, after a 
terrible time in Gallipoli : " I think God is 
waiting for England to learn many things 
before the war will end, and she is so very, 
very slow in learning. Once she does, and 
realises her duties to the world as well as to 
herself, then, and then only, do I think peace 
will come." 

It is to help the nation to learn these things, 
and so shorten the time that the Church is to 
undertake a national mission to the nation; 
and it is to gird ourselves for this great task 
and to prepare ourselves spiritually to accom- 
plish it, to which she will devote the great 
proportion of the coming year. 

But there is one set of people to whom the 
thought of God changes the outlook more 
than any other, and that is the mourners of 
the world. If their boys are really dead, and 
dead for ever, then there is nothing to relieve 
the darkness of the night. But if God is God, 
then we can trust them to Him to have a 
107 



The Conditions of Victory 

glorious, full, and interesting life before them 
beyond the grave. 

" As they come trooping from the war, 
Our skies have many a new-gold star." 

As one by one on the battlefield or in the 
hospital the light of their earthly life fades 
from their dear faces, it only seems to us that 
upon each of them the day is really breaking 
whilst the shadows flee away. As Archbishop 
Laud said in his last prayer before his execu- 
tion : " What is death but a little mist, a little 
vapour ? Lord, I am coming as fast as I can." 

It requires, then, no foolish ignoring of 
plain facts to enter upon a New Year in a 
hopeful spirit ; it requires only faith in God, 
faith in God which first produces penitence, 
then inspires action, then draws out sacrifice, 
and then breathes fortitude into the soul. 

In such a faith let the nation rise from its 
knees after these days of penitence and prayer, 
and with head erect pass on to the mighty task 
which lies close to its hand in the coming year. 

"God is; 
God sees ; 
God loves ; 
God knows. 
And Right is Right ; 
And Right is Might. 

1 08 



The Conditions of Victory 

" In the full ripeness of His Time, 
We shall see the plan sublime 
Of His beneficent intent. 
Live on in hope ! 
Press on in faith ! 
Love conquers all things, 
Even death." * 

* AWs Well, by John Oxenham. 



109 



VII 
IS THE WAR AN ARGUMENT AGAINST GOD ? * 

My subject is this : Is the fact of the present 
war an argument against a good God ? 

I have often given reasons why we beheve 
in a good God. I point first of all to Nature. 
I have said that you might as well expect a box 
of letters to throw themselves into a play of 
Shakespeare as to expect atoms to throw them- 
selves into the universe. There is the mark 
of mind in the great universe which we see. 
Secondly, I have showed that the Being behind 
the world is more than a clever devil ; we 
see the character of righteousness. I point to 
the conscience in every man, the conscience 
that tells the difference between right and 

* An open-air address delivered on Tower Hill in con- 
nection with the National Call to Repentance and Hope. 
This address was delivered to a great crowd at first very 
hostile owing to the exemption of the clergy from combatant 
service by Act of Parliament, but when many questions 
were asked and answered, the speaker was finally cheered 
off by the crowd. 

IIO 



Is the War an Argument against God ? 

wrong as surely as the eye tells us the difference 
between black and white. That shows that 
the power behind the world is righteous. 

Then I take the New Testament. I ask 
how it is that the cross came to be at the top 
of the dome of St. Paul's in what we consider 
the greatest city in the world. Glasgow men 
no doubt think Glasgow is the greatest, 
Montreal people think Montreal. But I ask 
you, Why does the cross, the old gallows, 
stand above this the greatest city in the world ? 
There is only one answer. He who died on 
the old gallows of the cross rose again the third 
day, and that has changed the badge of shame 
into the badge of glory. If, then, the New 
Testament is true, God is not only clever, not 
only righteous, but God also is love. There- 
fore there is a righteous, loving, mighty Being, 
with whom we ought to be in touch every 
day of our lives. 

Does the war contradict this ? Is the war 
really a breakdown of Christianity ? Does the 
occurrence of the present war prove that there 
is no good God at all ? 

I am constantly asked this question — Why 
does not God stop the war ? Why did God 
ever let the war come at all ? Well, I am going 

III 



Is the War an Argument against God ? 

to meet this question quite fairly. First of 
all, Is the present war a breakdown of Chris- 
tianity ? Secondly, Does it prove that God is 
not a good God ? 

(i) Now, let me take the first. I entirely deny 
that this is a war between Christian nations. 
I entirely deny that Germany from this point 
of view is a Christian nation at all. There 
are many individual Christians in Germany, 
many devout, good people; but I judge a 
nation, whether it is Christian or not, by the 
policy which directs the conduct of that 
nation. And I will venture to say that if any 
of you take the trouble to read the books which 
directed the policy of Germany you will see 
that it is not a Christian policy at all. If you 
want to find complete opposition to Christ, 
you take the " gospel " of the superman, which 
would trample the weak underfoot. If you 
want something absolutely opposite to the New 
Testament take the German War-book. 

It is said that those outside see most of the 
game, and I believe that that is a true saying. 
Certainly, if you would expect a nation, a 
clear-sighted, clever nation to look upon this 
war as a breakdown of Christianity that nation 
would be Japan. Japan does not at present 

112 



Is the War an Argument against God ? 

profess Christianity as a nation. Now, what 
has been the effect of the present war in Japan ? 
They have never looked in such a friendly way 
on Christianity as they have during this war, 
because they have seen their great Ally, 
England — they are very proud of being the 
Ally of England — they saw their great Ally 
hesitate for twenty-four hours as to whether 
it would do the Christian thing or not. They 
saw their great Ally hesitate for twenty-four 
hours as to whether it should remain within 
the silver circle of the sea, safe behind its 
mighty Navy ; Japan watched to see whether 
we really believed in the Christianity we had 
professed for so many years. And when they 
saw their great Ally fling aside questions of 
its own safety and take its stand beside poor 
little Belgium, it saw this nation do the most 
CHRiST-like thing it has done for a thousand 
years. Therefore, Japan has been ready to 
give a far more patient hearing to Christianity 
during the past two years than ever before. 

Then I will take another case. There was 
a brilhant young American called Butters — 
you may have seen his name in the papers. 
He was rich, he had every prospect before 
him ; he had no call of patriotism to urge 
I 113 



Is the War an Argument against God ? 

him to fight for England ; he was not an 
EngHshman ; but he volunteered. From the 
outside he watched what was going on, and he 
saw this was a contest, as he said, between a 
power which is evil on the one side and the 
principles of right, freedom and justice on the 
other. And that young American, all honour 
to his memory, laid down his life for our 
cause. 

Well, then, as I have said, these outsiders * 
see most of the game. And I entirely, there- 
fore, refuse to say that when it is a contest 
between the German War-book, between such 
principles as " might is right," and the prin- 
ciples for which the Allies are standing, I 
entirely refuse to say that this contest repre- 
sents the breakdown of Christianity. We 
on our side are fighting for what we believe 
to be right ; and never could we as a people 
be more disgraced than if we had not taken 
our stand on the side of freedom and justice 
on the 4th of August, 1914. 

(2) Now I come to the second point. Does 
this great contest — and I know how terrible it 
is by seeing something of it with my own eyes 
during six services a day held under shell fire 

♦ This was before the United States came into the war. 
114 



Is the War an Argument against God? 

in 191 5 — does this prove that there is no good 
God ? I am going to ask you a question in 
return. Do you beHeve, or do you not beheve, 
in free-will? I used to debate this with my 
friends in East London — and how fond they 
were of arguing. They can talk in Spitalfields ! 
I would have, perhaps, five hundred working- 
men ; they would begin by thinking it would 
be better if we were bound to go right, like 
clocks or puppets ; then later they would 
decide that with all its risks it is neverthe- 
less better to be free men, better to be 
free to go right, or free to go wrong. Some 
people argue that there is a kind of inevitable 
necessity which constrains you to do this or 
that ; but let a man steal your dinner four 
days running and you will have something 
to say about necessity ! We know that we 
have all got free-will ; and we agree on the 
whole that it is a good thing that we have 
got free-will. You cannot have your bread 
buttered on both sides, and if you have the 
free-will to go right you have also the free-will 
to go wrong. That applies to each man ; it 
applies also to each nation. God will not stop 
a man going to the devil if he is determined 
to go ; or stop a nation going to the devil if 

"5 



Is the War an Argument against God ? 

it is determined to go. Tliis freedom of 
will then puts a great responsibility upon 
us all ; for it is part of our most GoD-like 
attribute. 

Now comes the point. If some villainous 
fellow puts- six sleepers on the railway to-night 
in front of the Scotch express, please God we 
will catch him afterwards and give him the 
punishment he deserves ; but God will not 
stretch out His Almighty hand and remove 
those sleepers — there will be an accident. And 
if a nation is determined to have war as Ger- 
many was determined, God is not going to 
stop that war from coming. God respects the 
free-will of the individual and of the nation. 
In other words, if a man or a nation sets out 
to go to the devil, there will be persuasion, 
there will be pleading with it ; but if the 
nation is determined, or if you are determined 
to go to the devil, to the devil both you and 
it will go. Judas, we are told, went to " his 
own place " ; that is what we are told in the 
Scriptures. And in passing I cannot help 
saying to my brothers here, Do you know 
where you are going ? Because your eternal 
future depends upon the use you make here 
of your free-will. 

ii6 



Is the War an Argument against God ? 

There is a picture in the Bible of the potter * 
and the clay which is the best picture of God's 
attitude towards the war that I know. Some 
people speak as if the potter had power over 
the clay irrespective of the nature of the clay. 
You go to a potter and see him at work. That 
is what Jeremiah was told to do. So he went, 
and he saw a potter at work in his shop. Did 
he find that the potter could do what he liked 
with the clay ? Why, the clay defeated him 
repeatedly. But when he could not do one 
thing with the clay he then set about doing 
another. When the potter tried, for instance, 
to make a porcelain vase, but could not, he 
then made a useful bowl instead. 

That is a picture, my people, of God's deal- 
ing with human nature. The first design of 
the potter is universal peace. God absolutely 
hates war ; God made of one blood all nations 
of men ; His design for us was that we should 
be living in unity with one another. But He 
is defeated if a great nation is determined on 
war. So God turns to the second best. He 
has drawn out in consequence of the war 
a glorious outpouring of unselfish service 

* This is drawn out in The Potter and the Clay, published 
by Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., Ltd. 

117 



Is the War an Argument against God ? 

such as we had never seen in our time 
before. I was talking to a mother who has 
lost her husband and three of her five sons in 
the war ; after a short prayer with her she 
said : " I would not have it otherwise, Bishop, 
because this has ennobled the whole nation." 
Yes, and that is the sort of woman that ennobles 
a nation. 

I have here a little description given me by 
a padre who was in the thick of the firing the 
whole time. It is a description by a Middlesex 
lad of an open-air service on his last evening 
before he went into battle. Then he con- 
cludes : " Our padre is a grand chap ; he's 
with us everywhere." That padre I have just 
seen to-day. 

Then here is a letter in pencil received this 
morning from a padre who is also a captain, 
and who has come back, having been seriously 
wounded in saving no less than seven men. 
Here in a daily paper is a picture of his tunic ; 
there a picture of his inside steel waistcoat 
under his tunic, which saved his life ; he saw 
a bomb about to explode ; he flung himself 
on that bomb and was almost torn to pieces 
by the explosion. I am going to see him in 
an hour's time on my way back. Well, he 

ii8 



Is the War an Argument against God ? 

risked his Hfe saving seven men, and he was a 
parson. That is the answer to the people who 
say our curates are cowards. 

God has brought out the fortitude of 
our splendid women and the courage of our 
gallant men ; He has produced as a great 
Potter a wonderful bowl of universal service. 
Thus God has wrought good out of evil. This 
is the devil's war, but God has turned the 
devil's weapon against himself. 

So I will finish with these last few words. 
How is God going to finish this war ? God 
is going to finish, first of all, by the right hand 
and brave hearts of our boys — God bless them ! 
I see many of them on Salisbury Plain before 
they start for the Front, and I saw their 
splendid courage as I went along the firing- 
line in 1 91 5. Therefore, I say that we at 
home have to be worthy of our defenders. 

I believe myself that this outburst of man- 
hood in the nation is in a thoroughly righteous 
cause. And we at home have to make our 
country worthy of its defenders. I believe 
myself that we are instruments in the hands of 
God to save the freedom of the world. But 
we must not break in God's hand. God 
stretches down His Hand in the day of His 

"9 



Is the War an Argument against God ? 

wrath to find a polished shaft in His quiver — 
that is our country ; but what if the poHshed 
shaft breaks in two ? 

We have no right to have such a Drink Bill — 
j^l 8 1 ,000,000 spent in drink ! It is a disgrace 
that a Royal Commission Report should have 
to say that ten per cent, of the population is 
affected with a foul disease simply the result 
of man's immorality. It is a disgrace that 
there should be so many bad characters in our 
great music-halls every night. And it is the 
devil's own lie that a man cannot be moral 
and live a healthy life. The more moral you 
are the healthier you are. We have to nail 
to the counter the lies against morality. If, 
then, I am talking to any young fellow here 
who hesitates between a moral and immoral 
life, I could bring the evidence of a hundred 
of the greatest physicians and surgeons in 
London to show that no man suffers in health 
by living a strictly moral life. 

Before, then, we preach to other people, 
let us bear in mind that we have plenty of 
sins at home ; and we must repent of those 
sins if we are to be fit instruments in the hands 
of God. 

So now from end to end of London, and 
120 



Is the War an Argument against God ? 

throughout the country, we want to call the 
nation to its knees — not in humihation for the 
war, for our cause is that of freedom and 
righteousness, but to ask God to help us to 
put away our sins. We call the people to 
repentance and hope, that out of this great 
conflict may come forth a new London, a new 
England, and a new world. 



121 



VIII 

THE ROAD TO DMIASCUS * 

'* When it pleased God, Who separated me from my 
mother's womb and called me by His grace, to reveal His 
Son in me." — Gal. i. 15, 16. 

The Conversion of St. Paul was probably the 
greatest human event which ever happened 
in the history of the world. I say human 
because it cannot of course be compared to 
the Incarnation, the Atonement and the 
Resurrection of our Lord. But of human 
events it was the greatest, (i) First because of 
its unexpectedness. When the witnesses at the 
martyrdom of Stephen laid down their clothes 
at the feet of a young man whose name was 
Saul, the feared and ruthless persecutor of all 
Christians, would they have beheved you if 
you had told them that this very man would 
be the greatest missionary of that faith ever 

* Preached in a very poor parish in East London called 
St. Stephen's Old Ford. 

122 



The Road to Damascus 

known ? (2) But not only was there its un- 
expectedness. The event itself was so great 
because of its immediate and permanent 
results. 

Its immediate result was to rescue the 
Christian Church from being strangled in its 
birth by Jewish tradition. " Judaism," it has 
been well said, " was the cradle of the Christian 
Church and almost became its grave." It was 
St. Paul who with his vigorous intellect and 
independence of character prevented the 
Christian Church being confined to those who 
carried out the Jewish rite of circumcision. 

But, if the immediate results were so great, 
what shall we say of the permanent results ? 
It is not too much to say that the conversion 
of barbarous Britain into Christian England, 
is entirely, under God, due to the conversion 
of St. Paul, and rightly year by year in the 
great Cathedral dedicated to his name, do we 
commemorate the great event which changed 
the surface of the world, and equally rightly 
do you have in Old Ford side by side a St. 
Stephen's and a St. Paul's. 

(3) But we have not even yet touched the 
crowning significance of this great event, and 
that is the wonderful hope for the world, for 

123 ^ 



The Road to Damascus 

the country, for the parish, and for the 
individuals which it contains. 

It is one of the signs of the times that one 
of our leading newspapers {The Times) on each 
Saturday has now a thoughtful article on 
religion. The writer of one of these articles 
points out the hope for the world contained 
in the conversion of St. Paul. 

" The Conversion of St. Paul provides 
material for the theologian and the psycho- 
logist ; but it has no less a value for every 
student of human affairs. He is bidden 
by the memory of this event to take into 
his reckoning the unforeseen and incal- 
culable movements of the human person- 
ality. The story must sober all who 
boldly write the history of the future ; 
they may know many data, but they do 
not know, as some think, what is hidden 
in the depths of some human personality, 
or, as others believe, the mysterious appeal 
and travail of the Holy Spirit. What 
new turn may be given to the energies of 
this man or that, they do not know; but 
that may be a decisive factor. This man 
may fail us, for there are conversions froni 
124 



The Road to Damascus 

good to evil ; but that man now a " per- 
secutor and injurious " may save the 
Church, or the nation. The Feast of the 
Conversion of St. Paul teaches all men 
that in the future of mankind there will 
be factors which at present are unknown. 
The prophet of good cannot be over- 
presumptuous, but he need not despair. 

" Neither the friends nor the foes of 
the Christian Way in the Days after the 
Crucifixion could have foretold the one 
determining fact, which was to break 
down the barriers of race and set the 
Faith in the heart of the world. To 
them Saul of Tarsus was a terrible force, 
destined to work along a certain line till 
the end. Something happened. He said : 
' It pleased God to reveal His Son in me ' ; 
others have sought to interpret the change 
without calling in the Unseen ; but in 
any case something happened, and a new 
and unforeseen turn was given to the 
life of the Church and to the spiritual 
history of mankind." 

Now it seems to me that we want just 
such an encouragement to-day. The National 

125 



The Road to Damascus 

Mission, while it has deepened and spirituaHsed 
the Church and (certainly in London) has given 
a witness on the side of morality which has 
resounded through the world, has to a great 
extent failed to touch the outsider, thousands 
are still untouched by the Gospel message ; 
the war with all its glorious sacrifices, including 
those who perished in the great explosion,* who 
laid down their lives as truly for their country 
as those who have died in the trenches, has 
left many far better off than they were before, 
and as yet unmarked by the Cross, and what 
we want to-day is some sign in the sky that we 
really may soon look for some great change 
which may yet give us a new Heaven and a 
new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. 

Such a sign we have in the wonderful con- 
version of St. Paul, this unexpected, marvellous 
event which has changed the whole outlook 
of the world already, which promises an even 
greater change in the future. 

In order to realise the grounds of hope in 
our own lives, in our country, in our parish, and 
in the world, we must look more carefully to 
see what happened to change Saul into St. 
Paul. 

* This happened not far from the district of Old Ford. 
126 



The Road to Damascus 

(i) In the first place, the whole thing was 
an Act of God's. In our English legal phrase- 
ology an Act of God is reserved for some stroke 
of lightning or earthquake, or terrible catas- 
trophe which happens in the world, but this 
is a terribly misleading use of the phrase, it 
leads people to think that God glories in 
destruction. 

It would be, for instance, most misleading 
to say that the great explosion in the East End 
of London this week was an Act of God's ; 
those who died, died in the service of God ; 
the glorious Chemist died as Christ died, 
giving his life for his people, but it was not 
God's Will that this long-planned and care- 
fully prepared war was launched upon the 
world by Germany ; it was rather the act and 
will of the devil, and our heroes and heroines 
have died in fighting the works of the 
devil. 

No ! an Act of God is an Act of Love, and 
when it pleased God to reveal His Son in Saul 
and turn him into St. Paul, this was a true 
Act of God ; the flash of light was a flash of 
love, and it was a voice of love which cried : 
" Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me ? " 

Do we believe in God ? 
127 



The Road to Damascus 

Are we looking for the Hght ? Are we 
Hstening for the voice ? 

That is the first condition of any miracle 
taking place. 

Saul, blind and mistaken as he was, was con- 
scientious ; he was an honest man ; he believed 
in God ; He was anxious to spread the 
Kingdom of God. And therefore he was, in 
the frame of mind in which God could reveal 
His Son, and God did reveal His Son and 
could make His revelation clear to him. 

Now it is possible that the conversion of 
some of us is simply waiting for us to have 
the humility and open-mindedness and con- 
scientiousness of Saul. 

If we are quite satisfied with ourselves ; if 
we are looking to our own efforts, our own 
talents to carry us along ; we shall go on our 
way to Damascus, but no light will shine and 
no voice will sound. 

Do remember that you are nothing, and 
can do nothing, but that God is everything, 
and can do everything. 

God can change you from the self-centred 
man with no inspiration into an apostle of 
love ; He can change you from the middle- 
aged cynic into the devoted Christian worker ; 

128 



The Road to Damascus 

He can change you from the secret drinker, or 
the hidden sensuahst into the glory and self- 
control and purity of a child of God. 

" With man it is impossible, but not with 
God, for with God all things are possible." 

(2) But then comes the second stage and 
the essential second stage — " Lord, what wilt 
Thou have me to do ? " 

True religion is always practical ; it is much 
more than " morality tinged with emotion." 

What practical steps can you take this New 
Year? 

Ought you to join a Bible class ? Be con- 
firmed ? Give up that bad friendship ? Come 
to church again regularly ? Return to Com- 
munion ? Have something practical in your 
mind when you say, " Lord, what wilt Thou 
have me to do ? " 

(3) And when the vision opens out, obey 
it. 

One of the most beautiful of St. Paul's 
own descriptions of his conversion was given 
in his words to Agrippa : •' I was not dis- 
obedient to the heavenly vision." Can you 
catch even a fleeting vision of yourself — very 
different from what you are to-night — a man 
of prayer, of witness, of service ? then follow 

K 129 



The Road to Damascus 

the gleam and obey the vision, and you too 
will be a new man. 

(4) But if this is true of the individual, it 
is true also of the parish. 

It is only God Who can change the parish. 
It can only be changed by an outpouring of 
Love working through men and women. 

Love can do anything ; it was the love in 
the Cross which changed St. Paul — " He loved 
me," he said, " and gave Himself for me." 
Dear brothers and sisters who have been 
gathered in love by the ministry of the dear 
old Vicar and by the present Vicar and his 
colleagues : 

It is only love which is going to convert 
this parish. 

Elisha failed to heal when he sent his staff, 
but when he personally came and stretched 
himself over the child, he healed him. 

When shall we learn that it is only personal 
self-sacrifice and love of the people one by 
one which will convince them that we really 
love them and therefore that God does ? 

Never despair of anyone. 

That man " now a persecutor and injurious " 
may be the very one to save the Church and 
nation. 

130 



The Road to Damascus 

(5) And if we are not to despair of the 
parish, let no one despair of our nation. 

yVe have done wonders in the war in many 
ways ; who would have thought that five 
millions would have volunteered, that thou- 
sands of girls at risk of their lives volunteered 
for dangerous work ? why despair then of the 
complete conversion of the whole nation ? 
Why despair of having a really sober nation, 
of deliverance from the bad traditions which 
infect one-tenth of the nation with a fatal 
disease, of an end of the eternal war between 
Capital and Labour ? If Saul could be 
converted, why despair of a living brotherhood 
in the nation at last ? 

(6) And so, with regard to the future of the 
world : 

In speech after speech, sermon after sermon 
in these last two and a half years have I pointed 
out that there is only one hope for permanent 
peace for the world, and that is by the accept- 
ance by the whole world of the Gospel of 
Jesus Christ : " They shall not hurt or destroy 
in all my Holy Mountain, when the earth is 
filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the 
waters cover the seas." 

As we then approach the great Anniversary 
131 



The Road to Damascus 

of the Conversion of St. Paul, let us expect 
great things this year. 

It does please God to reveal His Son in 
each of us ; it is His great longing and desire 
that w^e each of us may " see Jesus," and by 
letting Him live in us reveal Him to the world. 

Look then as you have never looked before 
for the great Light ; listen as you have never 
listened before for the Voice which speaks — 
the still small voice in the conscience, the 
resounding voice with which He shakes the 
Heaven and the earth to-day ; pray as you 
have never prayed before, for the revelation 
of the Son, and with a force and a thoroughness 
and an unexpectedness which will again astonish 
the world, Saul the persecutor shall become 
Paul the Apostle, the Road to Damascus shall 
be trodden by converted men or women, the 
great miracle shall happen again, and a new 
parish, a new country and a new world dawn 
at last. 



132 



IX 

OUTSPOKEN WITNESS* 

" I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ ; for it is 
the Power of God." — Rom. i. i6. 

There is no doubt that St. Paul had every 
temptation to be ashamed of the Gospel ; to 
the ordinary cultivated men of the day who 
would have ordinarily been his associates, the 
Qospel seemed sheer foolishness, not to say 
bad form. It would be almost like a member 
of the Athenaeum announcing to his fellow- 
members that he had joined the Salvation 
Army ; there would be a look of mild surprise, 
and what would be harder for a cultivated 
man to bear, the knowledge that, behind his 
back, people would freely say that he had gone 
off his head. 

Again, as a Jew, he knew that the Jews 
would look upon it as sheer blasphemy ; 
the Cross was an awful stumbling block to 
them ; how could you reconcile the doctrine 

* Preached somewhere in the West End of London. 



Outspoken Witness 

of the Cross with the Jehovah of the Old 
Testament or with the current belief of a great 
and glorious Messiah who was to chase away 
the Romans and make Jerusalem the centre 
of the world ? While, on the other hand, to 
the Romans with their great ideas of law and 
order, and their contempt for slaves, it seems 
nothing less than madness to go to Rome and 
preach that the Saviour of the world had 
been gibbeted on the Cross like a criminal or 
a slave. 

And yet none of these things daunted St. 
Paul ; none of them made him ashamed of the 
Gospel, and that was because he knew the 
Gospel was true ; after all, " seeing is believing." 

The whole idea of Zeppelins is so novel, the 
difficulty of dealing with them obviously so 
great, that someone who had been away for 
twenty years might easily come back to England 
and hold the view that it was impossible for a 
great ship to be over London dealing death, 
and impossible for a small aeroplane to get 
near enough to destroy it. But the answer of 
thousands in London, probably of many in this 
congregation, would have been : " My dear sir, 
I saw it, I saw the great flaming thing come 
down." So it was with St. Paul, he had seen 

134 



Outspoken Witness 

and he had heard and he had put to the proof 
what he had heard, and he had found it come 
true, and therefore, naturally, he was not 
ashamed of it. Notice the four stages : 

(i) He saw a light above the brightness of 
the sun, and it was " a light which never shone 
on land or sea." 

(2) More awful still — he heard a voice, 
speaking to him as if he was the only one in 
all the world : " Saul, Saul, why persecutest 
thou Me ? " Could tjiis be the voice of Him 
whom these poor Christians he had hounded 
to death had said with their last breath 
had risen again ? Good God ! it was ! The 
voice spoke again : " I am Jesus whom thou 
persecutest." 

(3) He had seen ; he had heard ; he had 
yet to suifer. '* I will show him how great 
things he must suffer for My Name's sake.'' 
And in his suffering, as so often happens, he 
finds the promised strength : " Let this thorn 
in the flesh depart from me," but the answer 
came, " My grace is sufficient for thee, for 
My strength is made perfect in weakness." 
What supported him, he found supported 
others ; he never found it fail ; it was the one 
key which opened every lock ; souls which 



1 

,.'aI 



Outspoken Witness "-2| 



were untouched by his old philosophical argu- 
ments went down before the Cross, minds 
which were unhumbled by a display of power, 
bowed low before the Incarnation ; he had 
seen the Zeppelin fall ; much more than that 
— he had seen Satan like lightning fall from 
Heaven. 

(4) And therefore, notice, he knew. It must 
have been pathetic to him, to have all the old 
arguments used against him which he had used 
so often once himself, " that such a belief was 
not for the educated, that it contradicted the 
unity of God, that the whole thing was undig- 
nified and of course impossible ; " for all the 
time there was singing in St. Paul's soul the 
glorious fact that it was all absolutely true, 
that the worst shame was the highest wonder, 
and for the rest of his life God forbid that he 
should glory save in the Cross of his Lord 
Jesus Christ, by Whom the world was crucified 
unto Him and He to the world. 

Nearly two thousand years have passed since 
then, but the world is still asking for the 
power of God ; it is still asking for something 
which shall tame human passion and produce 
a new Heaven and a new earth wherein 
dwelleth righteousness ; so far as this Church 

136 



Outspoken Witness 

and nation is concerned, we are pledged in 
the National Mission to find it or die in the 
attempt ; to go back to the old world of 
broken fellowship and despair of being able 
to grapple with human passion, is to have made 
our boys die in vain. 

Everything else has clearly failed : 
(i) Culture was tried in certain quarters, and 
the result was the most appalling outbreak of 
vice in Berlin before the war and since the war ; 
it has been shown at its true value in Belgium, 
Poland and Armenia. 

(2) But Germany is not the only place 
where health lectures and ethical teaching 
were being substituted for the teaching of the 
Christian Faith, with what results on Juvenile 
Crime we all know. 

(3) Repressive measures have been put into 
force by excellent and well-meaning men. 

Many of these have helped ; the music-halls 
will no longer harbour prostitutes, and the 
restriction of hours for selling drink has de- 
creased drunkenness, but no one can imagine 
for a moment that mere repression and punish- 
ment is going to work the revolution for which 
the world is longing. 

Where are we to look for the power ? and 

137 



Outspoken Witness 

who can doubt that if St. Paul stood here 
to-day — he would say, " There is only one 
power — the Gospel — I tried it in Corinth, I 
tried it in Rome, it is the only power which 
will change London. I am not ashamed to-day 
any more than two thousand years ago of the 
Gospel of Christ, for it — and nothing else — 
is the power of God unto salvation unto every 
soul which believeth, to the Jew first and also 
to the Greek." 

No ! St. Paul would not be ashamed, but 
would some of us be ashamed ? 

{a) Is there no such thing to-day as being 
ashamed intellectually of professing Christi- 
anity ? 

I have known people in the West End of 
London who have even supported Missions 
in East London, as quite a good thing for the 
poor, but who at the bottom of their hearts 
have up to now thought it was riot half clever 
enough a thing for them. 

{b) Is there no moral shame ? Are there 
no people calling themselves Christians, and 
even Churchmen who go about saying that 
New Testament morality is quite impossible, 
and that we must just make a truce with vice, 
and make it as little bad as possible ? 

"38 



Outspoken Witness 

(c) Is there no social shame ? If we are to 
have outspoken witnesses to-day, such as once 
converted the world — they are sadly difficult 
to find in the West End of London to-day. 

But there is a converting power at work 
to-day ! and it is the same thing which con- 
verted St. Paul — Suffering. 

People are suffering horribly ; the dear boy 
on whom their hopes were set is gone ; gone 
the chance of seeing him again on earth or 
having another of his cheery letters. 

" Oh ! for the touch of a vanished hand 
And the sound .of a voice which is still ! " 

And all the philosophy of the ages, and all 
the accumulated learning of years would be 
gladly bartered for one ray of absolute certainty 
that he was not gone for ever. 

It is that certainty the Gospel of St. Paul 
brings you ; he saw, he heard, he proved, he 
knew. 

And though with less distinctness because 
we are lesser men, there are men, aye ! and 
women among us to-day who have seen, and 
heard, and proved, and known. 

I have heard myself for twenty-eight years 
in London every argument which can be 

139 



Outspoken Witness 

brought against Christianity, but when, in 
your own private and public life, you have 
been directed and guided and chastened and 
corrected by an Unseen Person, when you 
have seen everything promised in the Gospel 
happen, when the Holy Ghost promised in 
the Gospel has convicted of sin and taken of 
Christ and shown it to you and others, and 
guided into all truth, when you have seen dis- 
tricts of London changed again and again from 
deserts into gardens of the Lord, when you have 
found the Christian religion the key to every 
locked heart, and no other key fit at all, then 
you listen with restrained impatience to all 
the people who tell you the thing is impossible ; 
for what you have heard, you have heard ; what 
you have seen, you have seen ; what you have 
proved, you have proved ; and what you know, 
yon know. 

Now what is holding you back from believing 
in the Gospel to-day ? 

On the answer to that question may 
depend your happiness far more than you 
realise. 

(i) Is it (quite frankly) that you have not 
taken religion seriously at all up to now ? 

But, if so, may I ask you whether you really 
140 



Outspoken Witness 

consider the world in its present state is 
satisfactory. 

It is notorious that this war has been pro- 
duced by the Power which openly says that 
it is sorry it ever took up the effete superstition 
of Christianity in the fourth century.* 

I should have thought that in the opinion 
of the whole civihsed world the doctrine of 
the Superman had been exploded for ever. 

This war could have been stopped if religion 
had been a greater power than it is. 

(2) But perhaps you are trying to beheve 
but cannot. Come away, then, from your 
intellectual difficulties and look at the effects 
of the Gospel. The Brahmins of India f are 
being converted by the effect of the Gospel 
on the poor and outcast. They see whole 
villages changed and they find the reason is 
that the villagers have become Christians ; to 
be six months Bishop of London would do 
more for your faith than tomes of theology. 
At any rate give your whole being the 
chance in this Day of God of learning the 
Truth. 

* See Professor Cramb's lectures. 

•j- This was told me by the Bishop of Madrai in 1117 last 
coQversatioa with him. 

141 



Outspoken Witness 

(3) Is it because you believe and don't 
practice ? 

But the Gospel is only said to be the power of 
God " to him that beheveth," and the belief 
meant is " faith that worketh by love." Come 
back to your prayers and your Communion ; look 
into your home life, your business life ; is this 
religion in which you profess to believe, govern- 
ing every item in that life ? are you a chivalrous 
friend, a loving and faithful husband, a good 
father and the soul of honour in social life ? 
Without it all mere lip belief is in vain. " The 
Kingdom of Heaven is at hand ; repent ye and 
believe the Gospel " — that is the message of 
the National Mission ; I preach it myself with 
no shame except that I am not a better man for 
preaching it so long, for let this Gospel once 
be believed by you, and you are a changed 
man or woman ; let it once go home to the 
nation and the New England has begun ; and 
when we wearily ask when shall war be over, 
and the nations of the world live at peace, 
St. Paul would only repeat the prophecy of 
Isaiah : " When the world is filled with the 
knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover 
the seas ; " in other words, when the Gospel 
has gone home to the world at last. 

142 



II 

THE HOPE FOR THE FUTURE 



I 

THE BROTHERHOOD OF CAPITAL AND 
LABOUR * 

Can there be a real brotherhood between the 
representatives of Capital and Labour ? 

The answer to the question I have set myself 
to answer is, at first sight, why not ? Capital 
and Labour are both essential to uniting the 
industries of the world and producing its 
goods; the industries of the world are, most 
of them, very productive. Why should not 
an amicable agreement be possible as to the 
share which each is to have ? 

But such a simple answer has not been the 
experience of the last fifty years. Capital and 
Labour have been incessantly at war, and in 
some industries, suspicion and hatred have 
grown to such a pitch that many despair of 
ever seeing a better state of things. Many 
think that the war averted the greatest strike 
ever known in the history of the nation. 

* An address delivered in Bow Church, Lent, 1915, 
during the dinner hour of the City. 
L 145 



The Brotherhood of Capital and Labour 

Of course there have been some noble 
exceptions, where a very different spirit has 
been manifested, but when, as so often has 
happened, the capitalist has frankly tried to 
make as much for himself as he can, and get 
his labour as cheaply as possible, and the 
labourer has done his best to defeat this by 
checking output, and getting as much as he 
can for as little work as possible, friction is 
sure to follow. 

Now I have often lately pointed my hearers 
to a new country, a new Church, a new empire, 
and a new world, as the only thing which is a 
worthy outcome of the sacrifice and struggle 
of to-day. But I always begin with my vision 
of a new country in which Capital and Labour 
are on friendly terms, in which every man 
has his chance and every dog his day, in which 
there should be a living wage and decent houses 
for all ; in which if the Hoxton boys were 
called to die for Hoxton again, it should be 
something worth dying for. 

But this can only be produced by a new 
spirit, and a new spirit can only come from a 
new Person who has never been invoked 
before ; it was He that sat upon the Throne 
Who said, " Behold ! I make all things new." 

146 



The Brotherhood of Capital and Labour 

Is this new spirit possible ? We look into 
the past for encouragement, and we find the 
most ancient and disgraceful institution of the 
old world — Slavery — destroyed by the oncom- 
ing of a new spirit. Jesus Christ never headed 
a slave revolt, but He preached brotherhood to 
all and breathed a new spirit into the world, 
which ultimately made slavery impossible. 

Now this is at once our encouragement and 
our guide ; it is often thought that the Church 
has failed in courage on the subject of Capital 
and Labour. I am not denying that it may 
have. But remember the Church seldom 
knows the real facts — when it does know the 
facts, it ought to speak with an unfaltering voice. 

When Rector of Bethnal Green, I used to 
go round with the Vestry of which I was a 
member, to see if houses were fit for human 
habitation or not, and told all my Church 
workers to report at once if landlords were not 
doing their duty by their tenants. When a clear 
case of injustice or oppression is made out, 
the Church is the tribune of the people, and, 
in the teeth of any amount of opposition to 
its work, or loss of subscriptions, must bear its 
witness against the wrongdoer, and like Nathan 
before David, must say, " Thou art the man ! " 

147 



The Brotherhood of Capital and Labour 

But, again and again, the Church cannot 
know in any particular dispute which side is 
to blame. 

A partner in a great industry in the North 
said to me after I had inspected his works 
(he had served right through the works all his 
life and had been made the junior partner by 
the firm) : " What is really wanted here is 
that one-third of the profits which now go to 
Capital, should go to Labour ! " But when I 
go to another firm, how can I know without 
any investigation that such should be the case 
there ? I have an inner conviction when I see 
the big houses built by capitalists that this 
probably should be the case in many in- 
dustries, but how can I know that another 
firm may not be keeping on their employees 
at a loss, as many do during a slack time in 
trade ? 

And therefore — in fairness to the Church, it 
must be remembered that, unless called in 
by both sides (as Bishop Westcott was), with 
the facts fully disclosed, it cannot take sides 
in any individual dispute ; it would be as 
wrong to denounce all employers as blood- 
suckers and tyrants as to hold up trades unions 
as instruments of the devil. 

148 



The Brotherhood of Capital and Labour 

But, while we cannot arbitrate in details, 
wc can lay down principles. 

(i) No industry should be carried on in this 
country which cannot pay a living wage to 
the labourers according to the standard of 
living at the time. 

Industries which can only be carried on by 
sweating must be banned out of the country. 

How much I rejoice that the agricultural 
labourers at last have a living wage, and the 
farmers a guaranteed price for wheat to enable 
them to pay it ! 

It is a Christian principle that the wage of 
the labourer must be the first charge on the 
industry. 

(2) It is a second Christian principle that 
the conditions of labour shall be the best 
possible. Nothing can make mining anything 
but arduous and more or less dangerous work, 
but no care or expense must be spared to see 
that every security for Hfe or Hmb is taken. 

Lord Shaftesbury's work was furiously op- 
posed at the time, but the verdict of posterity 
has been on his side. ' 

(3) But, having secured the fair wage and 
the sound conditions, it is an equally Christian 
principle that the work shall be given in full 

149 



The Brotherhood of Capital and Labour 

and fair measure for the wage received. The 
practice of restriction of output, which im- 
perilled at one time the success of the war, 
could only have grown up in an atmosphere 
of suspicion ; it was an entrenchment against 
an employer, distrusted and feared. No 
country where such a doctrine prevailed could 
expect to compete against a country where 
other customs prevailed. 

Now what is to produce this atmosphere of 
trust and co-operation ? We have tried unsuc- 
cessfully everything else ; suppose we try for 
a change Christianity. 

If masters and men could kneel at the foot 
of the Cross, and kneel together, the problem 
would be solved. 

There seems already a new spirit abroad in 
the trenches ; both are fighting and ^ying for 
the freedom of the world ; is it too much to 
hope that the brotherhood of the trenches will 
last beyond the war ? 

Masters and men have gone over the parapet 
side by side, or if not side by side, with the 
employer as a trusted officer, into equal danger 
with his men. Cannot this trust and con- 
fidence follow after the war ? They were 
ready to die for a common cause, let them be 
150 



The Brotherhood of Capital and Labour 

ready to live for it in the same spirit. These 
conferences begun by Mr. Hodge have a great 
future before them, if carried on in a Christian 
spirit : ^' All things are possible to him that 
believeth." 

What the Church can do is to try and bring 
the two together with the words uttered long 
ago : " Sirs, ye are brethren, why do ye wrong 
one unto another ? " 

Let the Church admit how often she has 
failed in her witness, and once again lay down 
the principles on which the brotherhood 
between Capital and Labour must rest. 

We may surely believe that if both can be 
led to refer their difficulties with one another 
to the one great flawless, unerring Arbitrator 
in earth or Heaven — we may yet have " a new 
Heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth 
righteousness." 



151 



II 

LOVE LIFE'S CHANCE 

" Though I give my body to be burned, and have not 
Love, I am nothing." — i Cor. xiii. 3 (R.V.). 

There is no word more frequently on the lips 
of the Christian preacher and yet no word is 
apparently more misunderstood than tliis word 
Love. 

(i) To some it is synonymous with every 
form of sensuous passion : " You don't really 
love me," says the tempter to the tempted 
girl, " or you would do what I ask you." 

But, for ever, Shakespeare has marked off 
the difference between Lust and Love. 

" Love comforteth like sunshine after rain, 
But Lust's effect is tempest after sun ! " 

(2) But while love is the reverse of lust, it 
is no pale placid ineffective sentiment ; there 
is always a fire about true love. 

" Thy blessed unction from above 
Is comfort, life and fire of love." 

152 



Love Life's Chance 

It burns brighter and purer and warmer 
every year ; it feeds on what it seems to 
consume ; and yet Hke the burning bush, the 
wonder is that the bush is not consumed. 

(3) Nor again does it wholly consist of feel- 
ing. Some of the most devout lovers of God 
are those who feel least ; who say : 

" Lord, it is my chief complaint 
That my love is weak and faint " ; 

and numbers of those who talk least about 
their love of humanity are those who will be 
the first to hear : 

" Inasmuch as ye did it to the least of these, 
ye did it to Me." 

Now the first thing to reahse is that this 
love, without which nothing is of avail, is a 
new thing in the world ; it is a new star which 
appeared on the horizon two thousand years 
ago. 

I was speaking in Enfield not long ago on 
the Shepherd Spirit which was the creation 
of Christianity. This love is the source of 
that Spirit. It is the larger whole from 
which the Shepherd Spirit sprang ; it would 
have been looked upon as mawkishness by 
Aristotle ; an impossibility by Plato ; weak- 
ness by the Romans, but it is the fulfilling of 

153 



Love Life's Chance 

the Law to St. Paul, and that is, (i) because 
for the first time, love was seen on the earth 
two thousand years ago. We could not have 
understood its rounded splendour, if we had 
not seen it ; we should be sure to have thought 
it too weak here or too stern there ; we should 
have made the picture too like a man or too 
like a woman ; there would have been too 
much strength there or too much softness 
here. But seen in a life, the whole world 
could understand love, and to use Bishop 
Walpole's beautiful words : 

" He was of kin to the whole world. 
But His freedom from the limitations of 
sex was even more strange than His racial 
characteristic. He understood women as 
well as men, understood them not simply 
by sympathy but by the same natural 
feeling that gave Him knowledge of man. 
He had the woman's instinct as well as 
the man's strength. There were ob- 
servable in Him those tendernesses which 
are so characteristic of women. He wept 
publicly, and was not ashamed. He 
allowed and justified the outward expres- 
sion of feeling towards Himself in kisses 

154 



Love Life's Chance 

and tears. He had a woman's power of 
attracting not only the confidences of 
others but the most tender relations. His 
friends came to Him as sons, and He could 
rejoice in their intimate affection. To lean 
on His breast as child on a mother's lap was 
natural in one who knew both His love 
and His strength. 

(2) It is from this, St. Paul, the devout lover 
of His Master, catches one by one the sahent 
points and photographs them, {a) Love suffers 
long and is kind. Look at Love in the servants' 
hall, buffeted, abused, but still kind, still 
giving Judas a last chance, by calling him 
friend, still heaUng Malchus' ear. 

{h) Love envies not. How different from 
the bitter jealousy which spoils even the 
Church work in the world, and is the bane 
of half the professions in the world—" profes- 
sional jealousy " is the reverse of love.^ 

{c) Again in an age of self-advertisement, 
Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, does 
not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own. 
(i) In the midst of a world of strident 
tempers where the bitter retort is always 
ready, " Love is not easily provoked '' 

155 



Love Life's Chance 

{e) In the midst of a world of ill-natured 
gossip, and unkind suspicions, Love thinketh no 
evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth 
in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all 
things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. 

(/) But perhaps most delightful of all, your 
true Love never fails you. He is always there. 
" Love never faileth," it is always waiting 
like the father in the parable ; three things 
are always there like guardian angels waiting 
for you round the corner — Faith, Hope and 
Love, but the greatest of these is Love. 

(3) And the home of this wonderful thing 
is meant of course to be the Church. You 
are meant to come to the Church to look for 
love, as naturally as you go to a garden to look 
for flowers, to paraphrase what Mr. Carey says 
about the Church as the House of Grace ; the 
Church is also the House of Love. 

From a cold, unsympathetic world, you are 
meant to open the door and come into the 
Church to find another atmosphere altogether ; 
no jealousy there, no self-seeking there, no 
ill-natured gossip there ; you have passed into 
another world ; here all is radiant love, and 
understanding sympathy, and mutual help, 
and hope and jov and faith, for you have come 

156 



Love Life's Chance 

into the inmost sacred shrine of the House of 
Love. 

And the very fact that to say this sounds 
almost ironical, shows us where we have 
got to begin ; we saw this plainly in the 
National Mission ; we must begin with the 
Church. It is very easy, of course, to use 
exaggerated language and entirely pervert 
truth ; nothing is easier than tcvfoul your own 
nest, and get cheap popularity by running 
down the Institution to which you belong. 

(i) Roughly speaking, the Church has done 
splendidly during the war, and all the choirs, 
the Church Lads' Brigades, Scout Corps, all 
the Sunday School teachers have all gone, 
and many of them have laid down their lives 
for the freedom of the world, and they have 
shown the greatest love of all, for " greater 
love hath no man than this, that he lay down 
his life for his friend." 

(2) Thousands of chaplains volunteered on 
the first day of the war, and all the Clergy of 
the Church of England would have been 
chaplains if there had been room for them 
all, or if they had been of the age, experience 
and physique to make the work possible for 
them. 

157 



Love Life's Chance 

(3) Those who have stayed at home are 
doing tvi^o men's work ; they are comforting 
the mourners, and gathering in prayer round 
the war shrines those who have never prayed 
before ; they are looking after — and never was 
their work more needed — the boys and girls 
working in the great munition factories 
throughout the land. 

The Church has come out splendidly during 
the war, and shown herself, when you can 
break through the frost of custom and the 
crust of conventionality, a house in which the 
heart of love still beats true. 

But just because, like the nation, it has 
shown true grit under the sudden trial, one 
yearns to have the Church still more com- 
pletely the Home of Love than it is to-day. 

(i) Why, for instance, these unnecessary 
separations ? 

I saw a speech from a Wesleyan chaplain 
last night to say that the troops at the front 
demand as their right greater co-operation 
and unity between the Churches, and it was 
for this I pleaded at the Wesleyan Conference. 

Instead of the Church appearing as the 
Home of Love to the man in the street, it 
has appeared to be the cockpit of faction and 

158 



Love Life's Chance 

a spectacle of disunion. Nothing must or can 
be done which violates principles, but every- 
thing must and should be done which, consistent 
with the outlines of the historic government and 
teaching of the Church, would make the Church 
once again a Home of Unity. 

(2) But we need not wait for this formal re- 
union. Is the Church itself, is the Church of 
this diocese, the Church of this parish, a Home 
of Love ? Do people say to-day, " See how 
these Christians love one another " ? 

Do they come as naturally to the Church 
people of this parish for love as they go to 
a garden for flowers ? 

If not, whose fault is it ? We shall never 
win the world if we rest upon our privileges 
and stand on our dignity. We shall never win 
the world if we are just precise, and correct 
and respectable ! There must be something 
like the fire of love in us. We must show 
the forthcoming of the Incarnation, the losing 
oneself to find oneself, the venture and daring 
of love. 

Come, Holy Ghost, then fill Thy Church 
with Love ! 

(3) And if we love, what ought it make 
us do ? 

159 



Love Life's Chance 

A Church with real Christians in it ought 
to be leading the mission work of London ; 
the funds of the diocese are to be amalgamated 
now into one Fund, the London Diocesan 
Fund. Your Church must be the first to 
raise it from j^8o,ooo to j^i 50,000 a year. 
Every missionary from the farthest end of 
the world must find a welcome here, for so 
hot will be the fire in the heart of a missionary 
Church that it will light a flame throughout 
the world which shall never be put out. If 
a Church loves, it loves to the ends of the 
earth, and if it loves at all, it will love like 
its Master, who having loved His own which 
were in the world, loved them unto the end. 

But none of this can be accomplished 
unless we ourselves are loving. Look straight 
in your own heart, brothers and sisters, and 
compare it with the love described in this 
chapter. 

Do people find you long-suffering and kind, 
do they find you unselfish and humble, glad 
when others are praised, discouraging ill- 
natured gossip and always ready to believe 
the best of everyone ! 

Do they find you generous, loyal and 
patient ? 

160 



Love Life's Chance 

If not, then ask for love to-day. Life, says 
Browning, is just the chance of gaining love. 

Lifers Chance is the title of Bishop Walpole's 
book. 

Life's Chance — are you missing it ? If so, 
you miss everything. Though you give all 
your goods to feed the poor, and have not love, 
you are nothing. 

Get love, and the humblest who loves be- 
comes a power ; he will have a share in the final 
victory, for if one thing is certain, it is the 
Triumph of Love. As certainly as the resistless 
tide rolls at last on the reluctant dunes on the 
beach, so love at last conquers the world, and 
as certainly as the great sun struggling through 
the mist rises at last, so certainly will love 
suffuse the earth with light 

. " For though the tired wave, vainly breaking, 
Seems here no painful inch to gain. 
Far back through creeks and inlets making, 
Comes silent, flooding in the main. 

" And not by eastern windows only. 

When daylight comes, comes in the light, 
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly. 
But westward, look, the land is bright." 



M l6l 



ill 

CHRIST THE INVISIBLE KING* 

" Whom, having not seen, ye love ; in whom, though 
now ye see Him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy un- 
speakable and full of glory." — I Pet. i. 8. 

" All authority has been given unto Me in heaven and in 
earth." — St. Matt, xxviii. i8. 

Is there an Invisible King of the World ? This 
question is forced upon us by three things 
at the present time : (i) There is the publi- 
cation of a book which no doubt will be 
widely read, of which I have been courteously 
sent an advance copy, by Mr. H. G. Wells — 
God the hwisible King. Of this I will speak 
in a moment. (2) We are bound to face the 
question through the appalling chaos which 
the appearance of the world presents to-day, 
and which makes many people imagine that 
the world has slipped out of the control 
of any higher power, and that, as a matter of 
fact, there is no King of the World. (3) Of 
course there is the fact that we have seen our 

• An address delivered on the Sunday after Ascension Day. 
162 



Christ the Invisible King 

King crowned on Ascension Day before Heaven 
and earth, and have kept His coronation day 
vi^ith shouts of triumph and hymns of praise. 

I. Now. I shall spend little time this morn- 
ing in rebutting the charges against current 
Christianity contained in the book to which 
I have alluded : 

{a) The Christianity attacked has never 
been taught, to my knowledge, in the 
Church for hundreds of years, and if 
rash and unbalanced statements have been 
sometimes made, such criticism from an 
honest mind does us good. 

Q?) The doctrine of the Trinity, which 
is the especial stumbling-block to the 
writer, is admittedly a great mystery, and 
was not invented by the Church. It is 
imbedded in the New Testament. Take 
the Baptism of our Lord ; the Father 
speaks, the Son is in the water, and the 
Holy Ghost descends as a dove. In the 
last discourses our Lord speaks to the 
Father and promises to send the Com- 
forter ; the doctrine of the Trinity is 
putting into words the sayings of the 
New Testament. 

163 



Christ the Invisible King 

(c) It is of course absolutely contra- 
dictory and one-sided to talk of a finite 
God. Is not a finite God a contradiction 
in terms ? It may be, as we shall see, that 
He is, " cabined, cribbed, confined " by 
human obstinacy and self-will ; but a God 
finite in Himself is no God, and a God 
which has nothing to do with nature, and 
which leaves out, apparently, according to 
Mr. Wells, creation and the flowers and 
the trees, is a God which does not own 
enough territory, and though He may be 
a petty princelet over certain princes, is 
not King of the World. 

(d) But I would rather recognise the 
beautiful sayings in the book : " God is 
a person ; God is courage ; God is eternally 
young." 

" He is by our poor scales of measure- 
ment, boundless love ; boundless courage ; 
boundless generosity." 

" He is thought and a steadfast will. 
He is our friend and brother and the light 
of the world. That, briefly, is the belief 
of the modern mind with regard to God." 

" It is as if this being bridged a thousand 
misunderstandings and brought us into 
164 



Christ the Invisible King 

fellowship with a great multitude of other 
people." 

" Closer He is than breathing, nearer 
than hands and feet." 

'' Therefore one goes about the world 
like one who was lonely and has found a 
lover, like one who was perplexed and has 
found a solution." 

" The true God goes through the world 
like fifes and drums and flags, calling for 
recruits along the street. We must go 
out to Him. We must accept His dis- 
cipline and fight His battle. The peace 
of God comes not by thinking about it 
but by forgetting oneself in Him." 

" God should be wise, brave and beauti- 
ful ; He should stand lightly on His feet 
in the morning-time, eager to go forward 
as though He had but newly risen to a 
day that was still but a promise. He 
should bear a sword — that clean, dis- 
criminating weapon — and His eyes should 
be bright as swords ; and His lips should 
be open in eagerness to the fresh adventure 
before Him ; and He should be in golden 
harness reflecting the rising sun." 

This is a splendid picture, but we can do 

165 



Christ the Invisible King 

better than that. This is only the dream 
of a man ; this is only the picture he has 
drawn by his imagination. With us it is a 
reality. That is our God ; we serve Him ; 
we follow Him. That is the God Who 
has been described for us by a better hand 
even than that of the writer from whose 
work I have just been reading, by one who 
had seen and loved Him on earth, and 
fell at His feet when he saw Him again. 
He said, " His eyes are as a flame of fire, 
and His feet like burnished brass, and 
His voice is as the sound of many waters, 
and out of His mouth proceedeth a sharp, 
two-edged sword, and His countenance is 
as the sun shining in its strength." There 
you are. There is the God, our only Lord, 
the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the 
Saviour and Redeemer of the world. 

For all that, what I have quoted from 
Mr. Wells is beautiful, and if you turn the 
word God into Christ, it is what many 
an ardent Christian has said about His 
invisible King any time in the last two 
thousand years. 

And so, instead of any irritation at the hard 
1 66 



Christ the Invisible King 

things said about orthodox Christianity, I 
would plead that we should all rejoice that a 
mind which thinks ahead, and whose think- 
ing is followed by so many all over the 
world, should have thought itself, at a time 
when some are giving up their faith in 
God, into so beautiful a conception of God, 
contradictory and onesided as it turns out 
to be. 

II. But at the same time, it is with intel- 
lectual and moral relief that we turn to 
consider again the claim we make for our King 
on His coronation day, or rather the claim 
which He makes for Himself and to which we 
enthusiastically assent. 

(i) He is Himself Lord of all the earth. 
There are not three Gods in the Christian 
religion, as Mr. Wells seems to think, but one 
God ; and this God made the world — " With- 
out Him was not anything made which was 
made." 

And this it is which gives the peculiar pathos 
to our Good Friday hymn : 

" His are the thousand sparkling rills, 

Which from a thousand fountains burst, 
And fill with music all the hills : 
And yet He saith, ' I thirst.' " 

167 



Christ the Invisible King 

We know all about the destruction of life 
in nature, and we know that one animal feeds 
on another, as we ourselves feed on other 
animals, but we do not admit that 

" Nature, red in tooth and claw 
With ravin, shrieks against our creed." 

On the contrary, naturalists tell us that the 
animal creation is uniformly happy, and that — 
apart from human sin — if God again looked 
out upon the earth, He would say, " It was 
very good." 

(2) But He is more than King of the World, 
He is King of the Mind. 

One of the most current misrepresentations 
of the teaching of Christianity is that there 
was no truth taught in the world and no light 
given until two thousand years ago, whereas, 
from the very earliest days of Christianity it 
was taught that Christ was the Logos or Word, 
that He has always been the truth from the 
beginning ; that just as the sun sends forth 
prevenient rays of early dawn, before he rises 
in his strength, so, centuries before the great 
revelation, the Word of God had been speak- 
ing to great minds, and that every ray of 
truth which lighted up Confucius or Buddha 

168 



Christ the Invisible King 

or Plato or Socrates came from the one source 
of light which was about later to rise in its 
strength. 

" I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light," 
said Christ, when He came, and by that say- 
ing He claimed the human mind : " You can 
do nothing against the Truth but for the 
Truth," is a saying which has cheered thou- 
sands in their days of doubt, for Christ 
claimed, and claims to-day, to be the Key to the 
World's Problems ; the Centre of the World's 
System of Thought ; the King of the Mind. 

(3) But more than that. He claims to be, 
and is acclaimed to be by all impartial thinkers, 
the King of the Conscience. Often and often 
have I quoted a saying of Bishop Temple's 
addressed to a thousand working men when 
he spoke on " Conscience and the Bible " — 
" Christ not only satisfies the human con- 
science, but He educates it." 

In other words. He is more perfect than the 
Human conscience could have conceived ; He 
has trained the human conscience to expand 
itself to take Him in. " Live so that Jesus 
Christ will approve of your life," cried John 
Stuart Mill to the young men of his day ; and 
Lecky — an impartial witness, if ever there was 

169 



Christ the Invisible King 

one — said, " The record of those three short 
years have done more to regenerate mankind 
than all the disquisitions of philosophers or 
all the plans of statesmen." We too agree 
that God is courage ; that God is perpetual 
youth ; that God is a Person. 

This King of ours is no vague, shadov^y 
power. He is flesh and blood ; He is the most 
wonderful person the world has ever seen ; 
He reigns even on the Cross, and the earliest 
representation of Him on the Cross is of a 
youth, always young, and with no mark of 
pain or suffering on His brow or His body. 

(4) And that is why He makes His fourth 
and most successful claim, and remains the 
crowned and attested " King of the Heart." 
You could not love an abstraction ; you could 
not love one who had done nothing. But 
you can love " a Man of Sorrows, and ac- 
quainted with grief " ; and when such a one, 
so young, so strong and so tender, says, " Come 
unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy 
laden," we come. 

It is not required or expected of us all 
to attain some ecstatic state of devotion, but 
there are few who would""flot dare to take up 
the beautiful words of long ago : 

170 



Christ the Invisible King 

" Whom, having not seen, we love ; and in 
Whom, behcving, we rejoice with joy unspeak- 
able and full of glory." 

We do not talk too much about it, but there 
is one occupant- of the throne in the heart of 
every earnest Christian : " His Lord and 
Saviour Jesus Christ." 

(5) But even now the claim is not finished ; 
many stay here, and their religion is indi- 
viduahstic and therefore stunted. When we 
started the Christian Social Union nearly 
thirty years ago, we put among the objects of 
the Union, to enforce the claim that Jesus 
Christ was the Living Master and King of 
human affairs. Everything else has failed to 
produce harmony or even a working co-opera- 
tion between Capital and Labour. 

Nothing will ever reconcile them but the 
fact and sight which abolished slavery — the 
Master and slave kneehng side by side at the 
Christian altar. Let both reahse that Christ 
is the King of Trade, and let social and in- 
dustrial life be ruled on Christian principles, 
and there shall be " a truce of God." 

(6) But, after all, what a span of time this 
life is ! what a contest of ants with ants are 
disputes about dividends and profits when you 

171 



Christ the Invisible King 

look up at the silent stars, and remember the 
thousands who pass every day from one hfe 
into eternity ! 

" The army of the Dead go by, and still go 
by! " 

But we are not afraid about those who pass 
from one life to the other, for there is one who 
stands King of the Other World, and it is 
He who cries on Easter Day : 

" I am He that liveth and was dead, and 
behold ! I am alive for evermore and have 
the keys of Hell and Death." The keys are 
the symbol of authority, and only witness to 
His simple and majestic claim, " All authority 
is given unto Me in Heaven and in Earth." 

HI. This, then, is the King we crown upon 
Ascension Day, and if He is all this, no wonder 
we cry : 

" Crown Him with many crowns, 
The Lamb upon His throne ; 
Hark ! how the heavenly anthem drowns 
All music but its own." 

And if it be urged. Why does such a King 
as this not show more power and win more 
victories, we must remember that the only final 
victory God means to win is a moral victory, 
and for this there must be three necessities. 

172 



Christ the Invisible King 

(i) The King is hampered in His rule (and 
this is what Mr. Wells is aiming at in his 
idea of a Finite God) by human self-will 
and ambition ; He is for a time defeated 
by unredeemed and unrepentant human 
nature. 

The Devil made the war, not God. But 
the Devil must be conquered by force. 

God will not strike dead an individual who 
sets himself up against Him, and He will not 
destroy His free-will, nor will He destroy in 
a moment a self-willed nation ; the mystery of 
iniquity must work for a time. 

Our task is to subdue the earth to the 
invisible King by prayer, by preaching, by 
sacraments ; to make the whole world accept 
Him as King. " All authority has been given 
unto Me . . ." He says, " therefore goP 

(2) And to accomplish this. He is calling 
for recruits ; hke Garibaldi, He cries : " I 
promise you forced marches, short rations, 
bloody battles, bonds, imprisonment and death. 
Let him who loves home and Fatherland follow 
me." He goes out to enrol recruits : 

" The Son of God goes forth to war, 
A kingly crown to gain ; 
His blood-red banner streams afar ! 
Who follows in His train ? " 

173 



Christ the Invisible King 

It is the glory of the Christian that he is 
asked to follow in His train. 

(3) A day is coming when the Triumph will 
be visible and complete. Not yet does He 
see all things put under His feet. Not yet, 
but some day the kingdom of the world shall 
become the Kingdom of the Lord and of His 
Christ, 

Crown Him then the King of your Mind, 
your Conscience, your Heart, your Life and 
your Future, and you shall be present at the 
day when visibly He takes to Himself His 
great power and reigns. 

Is Christ King of our minds, Lord of our 
consciences, the Ideal of our hearts, the Ruler 
of our conduct, the Hope of our souls after 
death ? We must crown Him King within 
first, then in our parishes, then in the world ; 
and if we are faithful we shall one day see this 
astounding sight : we shall see the stone which 
the builders rejected become the Head of the 
corner, and the despised and rejected of men 
openly and visibly proclaimed and acknow- 
ledged King of the World. 



174 



Ill 

THE BRIGHTNESS OF THE DAWN 



THE BLESSEDNESS OF SEEING BY FAITH* 

" Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have 
believed." — St. John xx. 29. 

All Saints' Day in the midst of a great war has 
a richness and significance which it can have 
at no other time. We are all thinking on that 
day of dear boyish faces ; I am thinking now of 
some who have been killed flying and have 
dropped to their death seventeen thousand feet ; 
others have died with their faces to the foe as 
they led on their men ; others, equally heroic, 
from accidents while preparing for the battle ; 
they have gone and with a pathos too deep 
for words, we think of their dear smiles and 
happy laughter and almost choke to think we 
shall never see them on earth again. 

One mother is quite certain that her boy, 
who had been almost husband and father 
as well as son, came back to her after his fatal 
fall, and clothed in the same dress in which 

* An address delivered on All Saints' Day, 1917. 
N 177 



The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 

he had gone, but dazzHng above the brightness 
of the sun, threw his arms round her, pressed 
his Hps on hers, and said in a voice of surprising 
tenderness : 

" No, Mummy ! I am not coming back to 
you on earth any more." 

We are absolutely forced to ask — What are 
they doing ? What do we know about the 
other world ? No other question, except see- 
ing that they have not died in vain, is of any 
importance except this. Are they happy ? 
Have they a full and vital human life ? Are 
they near us in spirit ? Shall we see them 
again ? 

And if I seek to answer some of these ques- 
tions now, it is with a deep sense of my in- 
adequacy to deal with so vast a subject, but 
also with a behef that it is the failure to reahse 
how much we can know which has driven 
people to Theosophy and Spirituahsm. 

(i) And first let me defend discussing such 
a subject on the day sacred to the Saints. 

" Our boy would have laughed at being 
called a saint," was said to me not long ago, 
but I believe we are often wrong as to what a 
saint is. We mix it up with stained windows, 
but I agree with James Russell Lowell : 

178 



The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 

" One Feast, of Church's feast the crest, 
I, though no Churchman, love to keep : 
All Saints, the unknown good who rest 
In God's still memory folded deep." 

All Souls' Day is a day I hope we shall restore 
in the new Prayer Book, for the instinct of 
the Church was to love all created spirits, and 
those who will may then commemorate their 
boys on All Souls' Day; but I shall keep the 
memory of my boys on the Feast of All Saints, 
for by their fearlessness, their cleanness of 
life, their purity of character, their devotion 
unto death, in a short time, they have fulfilled 
a long time, and have raised for ever the 
standard of what life in this world may be. 

Now what do we really know for certain 
about them ? 

That is the urgent and insistent question 
to-day — a question for the lack of a satis- 
factory answer to which men and women are 
flocking to mediums to-day only to find the 
bitter disappointment of those who try to 
believe because they see, whereas the blessing 
is promised " to those who have not seen but 
yet have believed." 

(i) It is revealed for certain that they are 
alive, alive as much as they ever were. One 

179 



The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 

of the unquestioned sayings of the Son of God 
was contained in the familiar words, " In my 
Father's House are many mansions ; if it were 
not so, I would have told you," and those who 
accept St. John's Gospel have the further 
promise : " I am the Resurrection and the 
Life ; he that liveth and believeth in Me shall 
never die." 

All this was not a surprise to the world ; 
it was prepared for by the instinct of im- 
mortality in all of us ; it was prepared for by 
the Egyptian Book of the Dead, where the 
soul stands before some Higher Power ; by 
the Jewish belief in Immortality, but it becomes 
only a certainty because the Son of God came 
from Heaven and told us ; indeed He says : " If 
it were not so, I would have told you," i. e. " if 
that instinct and age-long belief were leading 
you astray, you should have known the worst." 

Now if we knew for certain no more than 
that, what a relief from despair ! I shall never 
forget seeing a wife one Sunday, who had heard 
her husband was missing, bowed in sorrow and 
despair, and the next Sunday her face trans- 
figured with joy because she heard by a post- 
card that he was alive, a prisoner, it was true, 
and away perhaps for years, but still alive. 

1 80 



The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 

And ought there not to be more radiant grati- 
tude and joy than there is when Christ stands 
triumphant on Easter Day and cries : " I am 
He that liveth and was dead, and behold I am 
alive for evermore, and have the keys of Hell 
and of Death." 

(2) But is it real life ? is it a full human 
life ? a life they can enjoy ? 

And I have no doubt, as Bishop Walpole 
points out in his excellent book, Life in the 
World to Come, that this was the object of 
those appearances of our Lord after His 
resurrection, " He took of the bread and 
fish " and said, " A spirit hath not flesh and 
bones, as ye see me have." The description 
of the mysterious life of our Lord in the 
New Testament between the Resurrection 
and the Ascension Day does not imply that 
that life is literally the same life as the life 
beyond the veil, but it is speaking in the 
only language we can understand here ; we 
have not the faculties to grasp the exact truth : 
" Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, the things 
which the Lord hath prepared for them that 
love Him," but we are able to spell out con- 
tinuity, vitality, completeness of life, something 
which every pure-hearted, full-blooded spirit 

181 



The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 

can enjoy; something which can make true 
the saying of the Psalmist, " He asked life of 
Thee. Thou hast given him a long life, even 
for ever and ever." 

(3) And in the third place, being a full life, 
it is not a solitary life. 

One of the most touching things said during 
the war was by a mother of a rich and handsome 
son, owner of a great estate, killed quite early 
in the war — " It does not seem lonely, all 
these young knights going out together." We 
are learning a little bit to-day the social side 
of Christianity ; that the ideally full life is not 
lived in solitude ; that the life of the CathoHc 
Church is meant to be a brotherhood, and 
full of far more brotherly sympathy and love 
than we have yet succeeded in making it. 

But, if this is so, think of what the life in 
the world to come must be, from which all 
jealousy and misunderstanding, and brutality 
and lust and drink are excluded, all the things 
which break up famihes and disturb our Church 
life here. 

What friendships must be formed there ! 
what comradeship ! The comradeship of the 
trenches is one of the most beautiful things 
we have yet seen on earth ; and it precedes 

182 



The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 

sometimes by a few hours the comradeship of 
the world to come. 

(4) But are the boys ready for this purity 
of Hf e, and unselfish service of the other world ? 
and here comes in the fourth distinct note 
of Progress, growth in character. We should 
have felt certain of it in any case, for a growing 
thing has to grow ; why should we suppose 
that a boy who has grown in character since 
his childhood should cease to grow because 
he has passed through the grave and gate of 
death, which does not touch the real man ? 
Five minutes after death he is still the same as 
five minutes before. But when the veil is lifted 
for even a moment, we find signs of growth ; 
even the selfish Dives had clearly grown in 
character, for he had learnt to have some care 
for his brothers ; and our Lord Himself says : 
" They that are counted worthy to attain that 
world neither marry nor are given in marriage, 
but are as the angels of God." He clearly 
intimates that the life is on a higher plane. 

(5) But are they transfigured beyond us ! 
Do they cease to be our boys ; our sons, our 
brothers, our husbands ? And here we may 
speak with absolute certainty. 

God's honour is pledged that the beautiful 
183 



The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 

love He has planted in the human breast shall 
not be mocked — " If it were not so, I would 
have told you " is an appeal to trust to the 
sincerity and honest dealing of God — no refine- 
ment of cruelty would be so great, no horror 
enacted even in this war so great, as giving a 
mother her superb love of son, or wife for her 
husband only to blast it for ever. No love 
could be possible for a God who could do this, 
rather undying hate, and it is really a blasphemy 
of the worst kind to harbour such a thought 
for a moment. All revelation is the other way 
— Christ gives back the son He had raised 
to his mother ; His last thought on earth is 
for His own mother ; He appears after rising 
from the dead, at once to those He loves on 
earth ; and the most characteristic saying 
which He uttered, and one which is full of 
meaning was this, " Behold and see — it is I 
Myself." 

" Behold and see ; it is I myself," is what 
our boy would be saying, if his voice could 
reach us through the veil. 

(6) But then comes the most pathetic ques- 
tion of all. Can they help us and be with us ? 

Those who have never had so vivid a vision 
as that described above can be certain that the 

184 



The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 

boys are far nearer than we often think ; we 
are told in the Epistle to the Hebrews that 
" we are come to Mount Sion and the spirits 
of just men made perfect " ; they pray for us 
and we for them, and many a time may the 
spirit of the boy we love be whispering 
comfort into our ear. 

(7) And above all — We shall see them again. 

" My eyes shall behold him and not another." 

" Oh, then what raptured greetings 

On Canaan's happy shore, 
What knitting sever'd friendships up, 

Where partings are no more ! 
Then eyes with joy shall sparkle 

That brimm'd with tears of late ; 
Orphans no longer fatherless. 

Nor widows desolate." 

But why cannot we see these things and 
these persons ? Why have the mist and the 
cloud and the veil at all ? And that is why I 
chose this particular saying of our Lord : 

" Thomas, because thou hast seen, thou hast 
believed : blessed are those who have not 
seen, and yet have believed." 

There is a pecuhar value to this seeing by 
faith. 

(i) In the first place it does not distort. 

No one can read The Necromancers or 

185 



The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 

Raymond without realising how distorted our 
ideas of the other world may be when we try 
to see. Contrast with these seven truths of the 
CathoHc Faith, the banahtiesof the life depicted 
in Raymond, or the horrors portrayed in The 
Necromancers. Can anyone say that even if 
they were true, anyone could be the least the 
better for them ? 

(2) These seven great truths which are 
revealed simply change life. 

{a) They lift us out of our paltriness to 
share the noble aims our boys have now 
before them ; they make the perfect 
sacrifice here, and have passed to a perfect 
service hereafter. 

(b) They lift us out of our mourning 
into the certainty of never-dying life ; we 
must not keep them back by mourning 
as those without hope. 

{c) They make us determine that where 
our treasure is there will our hearts be 
also. They put us on our mettle to live a 
life worthy of theirs. 

No one can live a mean or selfish life who 
believes his son is among the saints. 
186 



The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 

(3) And more than that — the very necessity 
for faith discipHnes our characters. 

To die still remains " the great adventure." 

There is always a danger that the vast 
interests of the v^^orld to come should bhnd 
man's eyes to the importance of the present. 

Hundreds are wasting valuable time to-day 
trying to see ; whereas they should be pre- 
paring here day by day for the vision when 
it comes — it is a positive training in character 
to see only one step at a time, and a literal 
truth is contained in the familiar Hne : 

" One step enough for me." 

Courage then, Hope and Aspiration are the 
messages of All Saints' Day, to mourners. 
" Look up, and Hft up your heads, for your 
redemption draweth nigh." Your Great 
Comrade in Heaven will never let you down : 

" Children, in My gracious keeping 
Leave ye now your dear ones sleeping." 

" You cannot see them now, but some day you 
shall see them with your own eyes again ; leave 
them to me ; I will guard them. I will teach 
them ; see that you grow in grace on earth, 
as they grow in Heaven." Others around you 

187 



The Blessedness of Seeing by Faith 

will try to see ; but if you walk by faith, then 
in increased hope and sincerity of soul, and 
in growing nobility of life, you will inherit the 
blessing of those who have not seen and yet 
have believed. 

" We know not when, we know not where, 
We know not what that world will be 
But this we know : it will be fair 
To see. 

" With heart athirst and thirsty face. 
We know and know not what shall be : 
Christ Jesus bring us of His grace 
To see. 

" Christ Jesus, bring us of His grace, 
Beyond all prayers our hope can pray. 
One day to see Him face to face — 
One day." 

C, RoSSETTI. 



II 

EASTER THE VICTORY OF FREEDOM * 

" This is the day which the Lord hath made ; we will 
rejoice and be glad in it." — Ps. cxviii. 24. 

I. It often happens, especially in this variable 
climate, that a day opens in mist and cloud. 
It is not quite certain at first, as we say, how- 
it will " turn out " ; outlines of scenery are 
not clear ; the issue of the day .is doubtful, 
and then at midday, or in the afternoon, all 
is different : the day has declared itself ; 
everything is seen in the clearest outline ; 
near and even distant views stand out, and 
the whole world is seen in the light of another 
day which the Lord hath made. 

So it has been with regard to the war. 
Even in the dim dawn of it, so far off to us 
now, the issues were fairly plain — to my mind 
even palpably plain ; but more cautious people 
talked about mixed motives, and you were 

* Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral, Easter Day, 1917. 
189 



Easter the Victory of Freedom 

hardly allowed to speak of a conflict between 
right and wrong, for fear of seeming to claim 
God exclusively on your side, and so make 
yourself as ridiculous as the German Emperor. 
Even some of your best friends said that you 
could not put the country's role higher than 
the role of a policeman ; and our boys fought 
and died, and more took their places and 
fought and died ; and though all men called 
them heroes, it was not thought quite right 
to call them martyrs, although they died 
with the brightness and even the joy of the 
martyrs of old. 

But now, all has changed ; the day has 
declared itself ; the mists have cleared away, 
and the whole world knows the issue. It is a 
fight for the freedom of the world against the 
most ruthless, most degrading and remorseless 
Tyranny which has ever been known in it. 
Let no one say that this amounts to asserting 
that there is not a single good man among 
the Germans, or a single bad man among the 
AlHes ; it is, of course, asserting nothing of 
the sort. There may be many now — and let 
us pray God there may be increasingly more 
— good individual Christian men and women 
among the Germans ; our complaint is that 

190 



Easter the Victory of Freedom 

they have, apparently, no influence whatever 
over the conduct of their cause. On the other 
hand, we are not posing in the least as a perfect 
nation ; we should never have pushed home 
so hard the National Mission, if we had believed 
ourselves perfect, complete in all the will of 
God. No one has spoken out more plainly 
than I have myself in every part of England 
and Scotland on the subject of national sins, 
such as Drink and Lust. 

But the fact remains : the one side is per- 
sistently guilty of acts of outrageous tyranny, 
and the other is lighting for international law, 
and the laws of chivalry and respect for those 
elementary principles of honour and pity 
which can alone make life on this earth desirable 
or even tolerable. 

Even before the American President's famous 
speech, the acts of tyranny were summarised 
by one of our most level-headed writers under 
eleven heads : 

1. The enemy have begun military action 
without a declaration of war. 

2. They have seized and put to death 
civilian hostages. 

3. They have violated neutral territory. 

191 



Easter the Victory of Freedom 

4. They have massacred non-combatants to 
terrorise the civil population. 

5. They have dropped explosives upon open 
towns. 

6. They have sunk innocent non-belligerent 
merchantmen, and of late months with no 
pretence of saving their crews. 

7. They began the use of poison-gas and 
burning oil. 

8. They have destroyed the passenger ships 
of belligerents, and even hospital ships. 

9. They have ill-treated prisoners of war, 
and compelled them, contrary to all inter- 
national conventions, to work against their 
own countries. 

10. They have, by military order and as 
an act of government, stolen private property 
and rifled banks. 

11. They have destroyed the houses and 
the orchards of the people who have sheltered 
them during the last two years, and carried 
off their young girls and children into a slavery 
worse than death. 

No tyrants of whom we have ever read in 
history have ever done worse. But those 
tyrants lived and tyrannised and died for the 

192 



Easter the Victory of Freedom 

most part before Christ came and taught the 
world that the exact opposite was the will of 
God, and the fact that all this is being done two 
thousand years after He came and died to save 
the world from this very tyranny makes it in a 
special degree a crucifying of the Son of God 
afresh, and putting Him to an open shame ! 

It is this which has brought into the struggle 
the United States of America — the greatest 
lovers of freedom in the world ; we must not 
blame them that as a nation they took so long 
to sec the truth, but I confess that I longed 
m the first years of the war that the great and 
mighty people whom I learnt to love and 
honour when I visited them ten years ago 
might see at last that the issue which was 
being fought for in this day of God was " The 
Freedom of the World." 

They have seen it at last ; it was as well to 
wait until all in the nation saw it, for now, 
with a determination which those who know 
the United States are certain will never 
weaken, the last free nation of the world has 
ranged itself under Freedom's banner. In 
burning words which will live in history, and 
which are an echo of the great Lincoln, the 
President says : 



o 193 



Easter the Victory of Freedom 

" The German Government has thrown 
aside all considerations of humanity and 
right and is running amok. We are now 
about to accept the gage of battle with 
this natural foe to liberty, and shall, if 
necessary, spend the whole force of the 
nation to check and nullify its pretensions 
and its power. . . . The world must be 
made safe for democracy. . . . 

" Civilisation seems to be in the balance, 
but right is more precious than peace, and 
we shall fight for the things which we 
have always carried nearest our hearts — 
for democracy, for the right of those who 
submit to authority to have a voice in 
their own government, for the rights and 
liberties of small nations, for the universal 
dominion of right by such a concert of 
free peoples as will bring peace and safety 
to all nations and make the world itself at 
last free. 

" To such a task we can dedicate our lives, 
our fortunes, everything we are, every- 
thing we have, with the pride of those who 
know the day has come when America is 
privileged to spend her blood and might 
for the principles that gave her birth and 
194 



Easter the Victory of Freedom 

the happiness and peace which she has 
treasured. God helping her, she can no 
other." 

And so, as the Spectator not long ago so truly 
said : 

" The greatest, the richest, and the 
most energetic of all the white com- 
munities of the world is now ranged on 
our side, and is pledged to use all the 
resources of a vast continent to beat down 
the pirates of land and sea, and free 
Europe from the enslaver. For any Eng- 
lishman to write or talk as if he did not 
feel a sense of profound relief at such an 
event would be to make himself ridiculous. 
Yet we beheve that those Americans, and 
we are glad to say that they are not a 
few, who are readers of the Spectator will 
not misunderstand us when we say : ' Our 
joy is great because America stands by our 
side, but it is far greater because America 
has awakened from her trance, has given 
her soul its rights, and has taken that 
place in the battle for the destruction of 
tyranny and for the reconstruction of 
the world on that basis of personal liberty, 



Easter the Victory of Freedom 

self-government, and international inde- 
pendence which should be man's inahen- 
able heritage, but of which he has so often 
been robbed by force and fraud.' Thank 
God ! it can no longer be possible for 
anyone to say of America : 

" ' She alone breaks from the van ^nd the freeman, 
She alone sinks to the rear and the slaves.' " 

And it is because the issue is now so plain 
that Russia has tossed away the rule which 
interfered with the fight for freedom, and, 
after years of autocracy found finally impos- 
sible to bear, even with a ruler personally 
kindly and unselfish, is trying to become, 
to the astonishment of the world a Free 
Republic. 

We ourselves have long known the joys of 
freedom, and it is because we are not only the 
children of the free but the mothers of the free 
that from every corner of the world the 
children of the Empire have come out to 
fight, not merely for the mother herself, as 
some think, but for the freedom which she 
taught them, the freedom they drew in with 
their mother's milk. 

It is because the British Empire is founded 
196 



Easter the Victory of Freedom 

upon freedom that it stands four-square to all 
the winds of heaven. 

II. But, it may be said, " This is all true, 
and impossible to deny, but what has this to 
do with Easter Day ? " 

Such a question illustrates precisely what 
Donald Hankey points out in that marvellous 
book, A Student in Arms, as characteristic of 
the soldier's attitude towards the Christian 
religion. " They admire immensely," he says, 
" courage, unselfishness, chivalry, and kindness, 
but consider that they have no sort of con- 
nection with religion ; religion is a thing apart, 
an affair for parsons and Sunday church- 
parade." 

It is one of those ghastly mistakes which 
to some extent account for the aloofness of 
millions of men from the Christian religion ; 
we have not succeeded in convincing them 
that it has the most intimate bearing on every 
living question of the day ; for Easter, as a 
matter of fact, is the seal and pledge of the 
victory of freedom. 

Every power of tyranny which ever cursed 
the earth assembled on Good Friday to crush 
out the freedom of the world. Sin held the 
sinner in firm grip, and there was no escape for 

197 



Easter the Victory of Freedom 

him ; slavery was an institution so ancient, so 
strong, that no other form of labour was even 
thought of ; military tyranny held down the 
little Jewish race, and a Pilate could toss a 
Christ to his foes and go home to his break- 
fast ; a Church could hound down the most 
religious soul that ever breathed to a felon's 
death and gloat over it ; no wonder that the 
blackness of thick darkness seemed to settle 
down upon the world on Good Friday, and 
made even the loving, trustful soul of the Son 
of God burst into the bitter cry : " My 
God ! My God ! why hast Thou , forsaken 
Me ? " 

But on Easter Day the sun shone again ; 
the tyrant's bonds were burst : 

" Sing unto the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously ; 
The horse and his rider hath He cast into the sea ! " 

The world breathed again ; the freedom of 
the world was won. Years would have to 
elapse before the freedom won on Easter Day 
would reach the confines of the earth ; the 
path of freedom would have to " broaden 
slowly down from precedent to precedent." 
Many a village Hampden would have to make 
his protest and suffer and die before freedom 

198 



Easter the Victory of Freedom 

could be attained ; but the principle of free- 
dom was established, and the power to attain 
it was won. 

Slavery might still go on for a time, and 
did go on, but when master and man had once 
knelt side by side at the Christian altar the 
thing was doomed ; the Roman Empire might 
still go on, and did, but a wedge had been 
driven in which would break it to pieces — 
and it broke it. Men and women would in 
every age be slaves to sin, but it was, after 
Easter, a voluntary bondage, and there was 
always the power at hand to set them free. 
When Christ rose from the grave on Easter 
Day, freedom rose with Him, and took into 
her hand the wand which shall one day rule 
the world. " This is the day which the Lord 
hath made ; we will rejoice and he glad in it^"* 
for on this day, two thousand years ago, the 
freedom of the world was won, the sentence of 
the God of Heaven was pronounced for all 
time upon " everything that was high and 
lofty," and the power of God was pledged for 
ever on the side of the weak against the strong, 
for " had not the solitary Man upon the Cross 
been stronger than the surrounding crowds ? " 
And every great Day of God which has leapt 

199 



Easter the Victory of Freedom 

to light since has been a repetition, or rather 
a reflection, of the hght of Easter Day. 

Once reahse (to use the title of a most strik- 
ing book by Mr. March Phillips) that " Europe 
is at last unbound,'''' once realise that we are in 
the midst of a Titanic struggle between liberty 
and tyranny, and that the surging millions 
now about to be locked in a final death struggle 
are deciding the question whether freedom or 
tyranny shall rule the world for the next 
thousand years, and perhaps for ever — once 
reahse this, and things begin to fall into their 
right perspective. 

Death, loss, pain, wounds, are horrible in 
themselves, but, glorified by the motive for 
which they were incurred, they lose their 
horror ; they are glorified by the freedom to 
win which they are endured ; the martyred 
boy who died in the cause of freedom fighting 
four German aeroplanes will be rejoicing in 
the other world even now, and in a few short 
years with those he loves, for having thus 
struck his blow for the freedom of the world. 

This day itself, with all its pains and death, 
is the most glorious day the world has known 
for at least a thousand years. When you say, 
" It is the day which the Lord hath made," 

200 



Easter the Victory of Freedom 

you do not mean that God stirred up the 
calculated ambition which caused the war, or 
the devilry shown in its execution, but that 
the day in which it is to be iinally destroyed 
is a Divine day ; it is a day of God ; it is a 
day which reflects the Light of Easter ; it is 
bright with a supernatural light, and filled with 
supernatural power, and in that sense it is a 
day which the Lord hath made. 

Let us be worthy, then, of living in such a 
day. " It is a great thing to be alive in the 
world to-day," said an old worker in Christ's 
cause to me not long ago. " Isn't it lucky, 
mother," said another boy to his mother, 
" that I was born just at the right time ? " 

And only recently a great statesman quoted 
the stirring words of Wordsworth : 

" Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
But to be young was very heaven ! " 

III. But what does it mean to be worthy of 
so great a day ? 

I. It means that we must fight on with 
unflinching courage to the end. Only an over- 
whelming victory can overthrow tyranny ; the 
quarrel, as the American President said, is not 
with the German people as such, but with 

201 



Easter the Victory of Freedom 

them as the victims and instruments of tyranny. 
We must, to use the words of one of the most 
beautiful of the war prayers, " give, and not 
count the cost ; fight, and not heed the 
wounds ; toil, and not seek for rest ; labour, 
and not ask for any reward but that of knowing 
that we do Thy will." 

2. We must do it with eyes wide open to 
the danger. Not nearly are the opposing forces 
overcome. The chief of the Imperial Staff 
early in 191 7 said that the Germans had a 
million more men than the year before, and 
asked for half a million more before July. 
Everything, literally czwrythifig must be sacri- 
ficed in answer to such an appeal. 

" fVho stands if freedom falls, 
Who dies if England live ! " 

3. We must do all this brightly and bravely 
as " children of the Resurrection." We are 
the children of the light and of the day ; death 
has no terrors for us. " Over the parapet ! " 
cried Donald Hankey to his men for the last 
time. " If you're wounded, there's Blighty ; 
if you're killed, there's the Resurrection ; " and 
for him it was the Resurrection. Or, as a boy 
of eighteen, who gave his life for his country, 
puts it : 

202 



Easter the Victory of Freedom 

" We do not fight this war from greed of gain ; 
We strive that others after may be free ; 
And while our bodies brave the change of pain, 
With holy prayers we trust our souls to Thee.*' * 

4. And, lastly, let us carry it all out, " with- 
out bitterness or self-seeking, but bearing about 
with us the infection of a good courage, that 
we may be diifusers of life, and may meet all 
ills and cross accidents with gallant and high- 
hearted happiness, giving God thanks always 
for all things." 

In that spirit, then, let us go forth to resume 
the mighty conflict. " This is the Day which 
the Lord hath made ; we will rejoice and be 
glad in it ; " for, indeed, the victory of Easter 
is the sign and seal from God that the 
banner of Freedom shall one day float over 
an enfranchised world, 

• J. C. Tuckc-y. 



203 



Ill 

1 

FOLLOWING THE STAR * 

"And when they saw the star, they rejoiced with 
exceeding great joy." — St. Matthew ii. lo. 

This is in a special sense the greatest day in 
all the long years of war, for our King himself 
has summoned us to prayer, and in noble words 
appraises at its true value the glory of our 
task, and yet points out the special gifts we 
need from Heaven, insight and courage — insight 
that we may clearly understand, amid all the 
distracting advice of those who would seek to 
guide us, what is the true path to pursue, and 
courage to pursue it with unfaltering foot- 
steps to the end. Never was the nation 
engaged in a nobler task than it is to-day, 
when it humbles itself before Almighty God, 
and prays as one man, " Make Thy way plain 
before my face." 

* Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral on January 6th, 1918, 
the Feast of the Epiphany, set apart by command of the 
King for Thanksgiving and Intercession. 

204 



Following the Star 

I. And in order that we may be encouraged 
in our day of Prayer and Thanksgiving, I want 
to fix your minds this morning upon an interest- 
ing group of seekers after Truth, who " followed 
the gleam " two thousand years ago. We 
know httle of these Wise Men from the East, 
whose wonderful journey we commemorate on 
this the Feast of Epiphany, but this we can 
say of them ; they displayed just those virtues, 
which we are imploring God to vouchsafe to 
us to-day. They showed insight, they showed 
courage, and because they followed the right 
star, and followed it to the end, they achieved 
the joy which the world could neither give 
nor take away, " For when they saw the star 
again," after deserting it for the moment to 
seek earthly guidance, " they rejoiced with 
exceeding great joy." And when we ask our- 
selves what there was about the appearance 
of the Star which should fill them with such 
exceeding joy, no doubt the first reason was 
they knew now that they were right ; they 
were right in having come ; they were right 
in leaving their far-off homes, in taking what 
no doubt some of their friends thought and 
said, was a fool's errand across boundless 
tracks of burning sand ; they were right in the 

205 



Following the Star 

particular star on which they had kept their eyes 
fixed through all the distracting splendour of 
an Eastern sky at midnight ; they were right, 
for they knew that, in that humble cave which 
is now, thank God, guarded by British soldiers, 
was lying at that moment the Mighty Saviour 
of the world. 

And if, dear people, the first note which I 
strike to-day is a note of joy, it is for the same 
reason which made the kings of the East 
rejoice two thousand years ago. 

If there is one thing absolutely certain to- 
day, it is that the nation was right in August 
1 91 4 in leaving the peaceful security of its 
homes, girdled by the silver sea and its mighty 
Navy, and plunging into the welter of blood 
which we call the Great War. 

We have sorrow to-day — we have tears ; but 
the sorrow is a noble sorrow, and the tears 
are tears of pride as well as grief. But if we 
were standing here to-day, having disowned 
our pledges, failed our friends, and tarnished 
for ever our reputation as a nation, no words 
would be able to describe the bitter tears of 
shame and sorrow with which every patriot 
to-day would hang his head. 

No ! We were right ; the gleam we followed 
206 



Following the Star 

was the true gleam ; the star of honour which 
led us on was the authentic star ; the powers 
which we faced have proved themselves even 
more the powers of darkness than we thought. 
To have allowed the whole earth to have been 
treated as Belgium, Serbia, and Armenia have 
been treated, would have been to have hell on 
earth ; and in spite of all loss and sorrow, and 
in full face of all the struggle and sacrifice which 
is to come, I ask you first to rejoice with exceed- 
ing great joy that the star which we followed 
clearly now " stands over where the young 
Child is " ; the star of honour has led us to 
Christ; the path of the just has again proved 
a shining Hght which shineth more and more 
unto the perfect day. 

II. But there was another reason for the joy 
which possessed these brave explorers in their 
great venture of faith. The Star to them was 
something more than a guide ; it was a prophet 
— it was the witness and forerunner of a coming 
dawn. There was a new day dawning on the 
world, for there was lying in that manger bed 
— notice the order of the prophetic announce- 
ment — a Governor most wonderful, a Coun- 
sellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, 
and — last of all — the Prince of Peace. 

207 



Following the Star 

Now it is not too much to say that the mis- 
understandings which have arisen with regard 
to the attitude of Christianity to war have 
arisen from the isolation of the one title, the 
Prince of Peace, from all the others — I may 
almost say the ignoring and exclusion of all 
the others in favour of the last. Thank God, 
there was the last : it would indeed be a sorry 
outlook for the world if there never was to be 
a day " when wars should be no more," and 
when, to use the words of another famous pro- 
phecy, " They shall not hurt or destroy in all 
My Holy Mountain." But I defy anyone to 
find, from one end of the Bible to the other, 
that peace was to be pursued at the cost of 
trampling under foot justice, wisdom, the 
honour of the Mighty God, and the welfare 
of the children of the Everlasting Father. In 
other words, the Child that was born at 
Bethlehem, and worshipped by the Wise Men 
at the Epiphany, was first a Governor, a Coun- 
sellor, a Mighty God, an Everlasting Father, 
before He could show Himself fully in His 
last and final character as a Prince of Peace. 

(d) In the first place, there must be the 
Governor. Men are freely asking to-day 
w^hether there is a Moral Governor of the 

208 



Following the Star 

world at all, and certainly if the war ended 
now there would be a strong case against it. 
Wickedness has at present triumphed all along 
the line. We were shown by an able writer 
the other day the cleverness of the cry, " No 
indemnities and no annexations," uttered by 
a nation which has gathered thousands of 
milhons into its purse by high-handed aggres- 
sion and ruthless robbery, and then offers to 
hand back the stripped and ruined vineyards 
and fruit-trees while she carries off the spoil. 
If there is to be no punishment — not vin- 
dictive retaliation, but honest and well- 
deserved punishment and retribution — for the 
desolation of Belgium, the agony of Serbia, 
the hapless men and women and children of 
Armenia, slowly done to death, then we may 
still ask : " Where is the God of the father- 
less and widow ? '' But we can no longer 
answer : " It is God in His Holy habitation," 
for, if His Name was to be called Wonderful 
and His first title was to be Governor, then 
before heaven and earth the Government of 
His world has failed, and the only thing 
wonderful about it has been the completeness 
of its ruin. But this can only happen if 
His warriors fail Him. Garibaldi rallied his 
P 209 



Following the Star 

followers with the splendid rallying-cry : " I 
promise you forced marches, short rations, 
bloody battles, wounds, imprisonment, and 
death : let him who loves home and Father- 
land follow me ! " — and the whole of Italy 
followed him. 

The Child Who was disclosed to the Wise 
Men to-day was the same Who was seen by 
the seer who knew Him best, as " riding forth 
conquering and to conquer." " His eyes were 
as a flame of fire " (of righteous indignation), 
and " out of His mouth went a sharp two- 
edged sword, and His countenance was as the 
sun shining in his strength," and as He goes 
forth He too utters the same rallying-cry, " I 
promise you forced marches, short rations, 
bloody battles, wounds, imprisonment, and 
death : let him who loves home and Father- 
land follow Me ! " 

(b) And with the Governor must go the 
Counsellor : the Star steadily shines, and pro- 
claims that Incarnate Wisdom lies in the Holy 
Mother's arms in that lowly stable. 

And how greatly we need Heavenly Wisdom 
to-day ! " If any man lack wisdom," we are 
told, " let him ask of God, Who giveth liber- 
ally, and upbraideth not." Wisdom that the 

210 



Following the Star 

nation may not be deceived hy the German 
agents now masquerading as Russian patriots : 
wisdom not to make the mistake of one hundred 
and seventeen years ago, when the patched-up 
peace of Amiens in 1801 lasted exactly fourteen 
months, and necessitated twelve more years of 
war, until a real peace was possible, which 
lasted for one hundred years : wisdom to dis- 
tinguish between war-weariness and real ex- 
haustion, between righteous indignation and 
unrighteous vindictiveness — between maudlin 
sentiment and true love of your enemies which 
means in many cases their military and naval 
defeat ; between braggadocio and true patriot- 
ism ; between a natural longing for a knock-out 
blow and the calm determination not to make 
peace until the object of entering the war has 
been attained. 

Yes ! indeed we need wisdom truly, and if 
we have followed the star to the manger-bed 
we shall do well to kneel before the Coun- 
sellor and pray Him " to pour His grace into 
our hearts, that as we have known the Incar- 
nation of His Son Jesus Christ by the message 
of an angel, so by His Cross and Passion we 
may be brought unto the glory of His Resur- 
rection." 

p 2 211 



Following the Star 

(c) For, indeed, if the great prophecy has 
been fulfilled, we are in the presence of the 
Mighty God Himself. " He that hath seen 
Me hath seen the Father." " I and My 
Father are one thing." " Before Abraham 
was, I am." So these great declarations ring 
out unsilenced down the ages, and if they are 
true, in the presence of what an immense 
Mystery are we gathered to-day ! 

" The Son of God His glory hides 
With parents mean and poor, 
And He, Who made the heavens, abides 
In dwelling-place obscure. 

" Those mighty Hands that rule the sky 
No earthly toil refuse : 
The Maker of the stars on high 
An humble trade pursues." 

If the dawn of the great day of Freedom and 
Brotherhood seems to tarry, may it not be 
that we have really, after all these two thousand 
years, not believed as a nation in this stupen- 
dous Epiphany ? Can it be that while we 
fight a Christian cause we are not sufficiently 
Christian ourselves ? Do let us bow ourselves 
to-day before the Mighty God, and instead 
of whittling away a miracle here or watering 
down the stupendous wonder there, frankly 

212 



Following the Star 

acknowledge that the whole Epiphany is 
miraculous from start to finish ; that God 
meant to do a great and startling thing, and 
has done it — and that, being a great and start- 
ling thing in itself, it is likely to be accompanied 
by startling events : that it is enough to say, 
when commands are clearly given by the 
Incarnate God, " The Most Mighty God hath 
spoken ! " 

{d) And so with the title Everlasting Father. 
It is a passionate hunger of the human soul 
which cries aloud for Fatherhood. We must 
have more proof of the care of God : it is 
not enough to hear that " Not a sparrow 
falls to the ground without your Father" — 
there must be action corresponding to the 
promise. 

God must have done something to prove it : 
there are tens of thousands of mourning hearts 
to-day, many no doubt in this cathedral, who 
ask : Have the boys died in vain ? Where are 
they now ? Is it true that underneath them 
are the Everlasting Arms, through Time and 
Eternity ? 

And there is no proof, unless the Star lead 
to-day the searchers after truth to the Incar- 
nate Love of God : then we may well picture 
213 



Following the Star 

God's response, in Browning's well-known 
words : 

*' Think ! Abib, dost thou think ? The Very God 
So the all-wise were the all-loving too. 
So through the thunder comes a human voice, 
Saying, O heart I made, a heart beats here. 

"Face My hands fashioned: see it in Myself! 

Thou hast no power, nor couldst conceive of Mine, 
But Love I gave thee, with Myself to love, 

And thou must love Me, Who hast died for thee." 

(e) And so we pass finally to the Prince of 
Peace. Justice satisfied, Wisdom justified of 
all her children ; God acknowledged as God, 
and adored ; the Everlasting Father's care for 
the least and the lowest acknowledged and 
proved ; and then, and not till then. Peace. 

Then the white war-horse can be changed 
for the peaceful foal of an ass ; the glittering 
sword for palm-branches ; the glad voices of 
children for the shouts of warriors ; and the 
Prince of Peace comes to His own at last. 

What a day ! for it means a new world ; it 
means that they shall not hurt or destroy in 
all My Holy Mountain, for the earth shall be 
filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the 
waters cover the seas. It means peace between 
Capital and Labour, between race and race, 

214 



Following the Star 

between master and man, between man and 
his Maker. It means that the Star has done its 
work, and the morning has come ; it means that 
heaviness has endured for a night (and a very- 
long one) but that joy has come in the morn- 
ing ; it means that the sucking child can now 
play by the hole of the asp, and the tongue of 
the dumb may sing ; for in the wilderness will 
have waters broken out, and streams in the 
desert. 

But until that glad morning comes, let us 
thank God for the Star, and follow its gleam. 

" Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom. 

Lead Thou me on ; 

The night is dark, and I am far from home, 

Lead Thou me on." 

Let US thank God to-day for the splendid 
valour of our youth, the unselfish service of 
our women, for the light of hope which has 
never failed us yet, for the coming into the 
war of the great Power in the West ; for the 
brightness and unselfishness which lights up 
the otherwise dreary watch in the trenches or 
on the sea ; for the fortitude of our mourners 
and the courage of the desolate : and let us 
pray, as we have never prayed before, for the 
spirit of our fathers, which onCe before (in the 

215 



Following the Star 

famous words of Pitt) '* saved their country by 
their exertions and Europe by their example." 
But even more than that — for, as Nurse Cavell 
has reminded us, " Patriotism is not enough " 
— let us bow ourselves at last as a nation before 
the Governor, the Counsellor, the Mighty God, 
the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace ; 
and full of His Divine Justice, Wisdom, Peace, 
and Love, go forth to achieve the one thing 
for which the world is longing — a reign of 
lasting peace. 



THE END 



2l6 



OTHER VOLUMES 

BY THE 

BISHOP OF LONDON 



THE POTTER AND THE CLAY 

Cloth, 3s. net 

EXTRACT FROM THE PREFACE 

"This book is an answer to the question asked me 
very often during the past two years . . . . ' How can 
you reconcile your belief in a good God, who is also 
powerful, with the continuance of this desolating War ? ' 

" It is with the hope that this book may comfort 
some mourning hearts, and bring light to some doubting 
minds, that I send forth The Potter and the ClayJ' 

THE CHURCH IN TIME 
OF WAR 

Cloth boards, 3s. net 

This book contains a few of the Addresses given and 
Sermons preached during the last twelve months. Among 
other subjects will be found — National Freedom, National 
Honour, National Faith, Fortitude (for Boys), Life for 
Ever and Ever (Canadian Memorial Service), Pride, 
Thankfulness and Sympathy (for Mourners), The Soul 
of a Nation, etc. 



OTHER VOLUMES BY 



THE EYES OF FLAME, cioth, 3.. net. 

This volume includes many striking Addresses, and 
among others the Addresses at the Guildhall in 
1 9 13, and the one on "The Invocation of Saints." 

EASTER THE VICTORY OF 
FREEDOM 

A Sermon preached in St. Paul's Cathedral on 
Easter Day, 191 7. 3^. net, 

A DAY OF GOD 

Five Sermons on the War, including " Drinking the 
Cup," and "Christ or Odin." 15. 3^. net. 

LIFE FOR EVER AND EVER 

A Sermon at the Canadian Memorial Service. (A 
space is left for a portrait of friend or relative.) 
3^. net. 

A MESSAGE FOR THE SUPREME 
MOMENT 

Delivered to the assembled Clergy of the London 
Diocese on November 23rd, 191 5, at St. Martin's- 
in-the-Fields. Paper cover, (yd. net. 

A CALL TO ARMS 

\d. net. 

DRINKING THE CUP 

\d. net. 



THE BISHOP OF LONDON 



Cloth, 3s. net 

THE ATTRACTIVENESS OF GOODNESS 

Published at zs. 6d. net each 

INTO THE FIGHTING LINE 

UNDER THE DOME 

WORK IN GREAT CITIES 

THE GOSPEL IN ACTION 

BANNERS OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 

THE FAITH OF CHURCH AND NATION 

Published at is, 6d. net each 

GOOD SHEPHERDS. Being Addresses delivered to 
those preparing for Holy Orders. 

MESSENGERS, WATCHMEN AND STEWARDS 
Being Three Addresses delivered to Clergy. 

THE MEN WHO CRUCIFY CHRIST. A Course of 
Lent Lectures. 

FRIENDS OF THE MASTER. A Sequel to "The 
Men who Crucify Christ." 

THE AFTERGLOW OF A GREAT REIGN 

chZTer/--;>; '"' •""' °' '^'^ -"^"^ appreciations of the late Queen's 

Cheap Edition. Paper covers, is. 3d. net 
WORK IN GREAT CITIES 

"We unheMtatingly tell all young workers, lay and clerical, that whether their 
work hes .n poor districts or ■well-to-do.' amongst n,en or lads, be it social o 
d.dact.c, they are do.ng themselves and the work great injustice so long as they- 

uiT • •isrrsi*"'' '''■ ^"-^-■^ ''^'«-— ''^- --'^'- "p-i-:^ 



VOLUMES BY THE BISHOP OF LONDON 

LENTEN MISSION VOLUMES 

Cloth, 3s. net; paper, 15. 3d. net each 

THE GOSPEL OF THE MIRACULOUS 

A MISSION OF THE SPIRIT 

THE MYSTERIES OF GOD 

SECRETS OF STRENGTH 

JOY IN GOD 

THE LOVE OF THE TRINITY 

THE CALL OF THE FATHER 

Published at 7d. net each 

DEATH IN THE LIGHT OF THE EPIPHANY. A 
Sermon preached before ihcir Majesties the King and Queen 
at Windsor on January 29lh, 191 1. 

"TWICE SAVED" 

THE TOUCH OF FAITH 



THE CHRISTIAN GIRL. Sewed. 1^. net. 
CHRIST'S SYMPATHY FOR YOUNG MEN. An 

Address to Young Men of the City. Sewed. \d. net. 
PURITY. An Address to Men only. Sewed. \d. net. 
SOCIAL PURITY. An Address given to a Meeting for 

Men only. Sewed. \d. net. 
THE WEAKNESS OF WEST END CHRISTIANITY. 

Sewed. \d. net. 
V^HAT YOUNG MEN COULD BE AND DO IN 

LONDON. Paper cover, bd. net. 
A CHARGE delivered to the Clergy and Churchwardens 

of London, in St. Paul's Cathedral, (Jclober 19th, 1905. \s. net. 
A CHARGE delivered to the Clergy and Churchwardens 

in the Diocese of London, October 191 1. 15. net. 
MESSAGES OF TO-DAY. Selected Passages from the 

writings of the Bishop of London. An appropriate Easter 

gift. Printed in red and black. \s. ^d. net ; leather, is. gd. net. 



London : WELLS GARDNER, DARTON & CO., Ltd. 
3 & 4, Paternoster Buildings, and 44 Victoria St., S.W. 



AJV^D ALL BOOKSELLERS 



Oeacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: u^y «pp^ 

Preservationtechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 



